[The homosexual] is a prodigious consumer of signs—of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common code impels the frenzied quest: in the momentary glimpse, the scrambled figure, the sporadic gesture, the chance encounter, the reverse image, the sudden slippage, the lowered guard.

— Harold Beaver, “Homosexual Signs,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 99-119, 105.