In recent years, authors have announced “the end of” and “the death of” everything from authors to the world. Given that last rites have been pronounced on education, the family, God, history, ideology, nature, and time, could gay be far behind?

Along comes Toronto literary critic Bert Archer with The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality), a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone treatment of sexual preference. Archer’s book is chattily written, intelligent, personally engaging, and makes a persuasive, historically anchored case that sexual identities are socially constructed rather than natural phenomena.

I should note that a book of mine, which Archer reviewed a couple of years ago, makes a friendly cameo appearance here, enlisted in support of his claim that gay and straight identities are dissolving among his Gen-XY cohort.

The big idea behind “the end of gay” is that the identity, culture, and institutions of contemporary homosexuality were created as a self-preserving reaction to societal oppression of gays; therefore, the political success of the gay movement and the assimilation of gays into consumerism may gradually obviate the need for a specific gay identity. Your sexual preference(s), goes the argument, may drop down the list of self-identification priorities to a place somewhere between eye colour and left- or right-handedness.

Curiously, Archer underplays this argument, even after demonstrating the importance of Second World War military screening procedures in creating the category of the homosexual. Instead, he opts for a vaguer notion of Zeitgeist to explain all. The longish conclusion to the book is weak, given over to free-base philosophizing, wishful thinking based on thin anecdotal evidence, and a bit of proselytizing.

Flaws aside, The End of Gay is lively conversation about an intrinsically interesting issue, namely, sexual desires. Like other trend spotters, Archer suffers from the occupational hazard of trying to rush history – which, as we ought to know by now, likes to take its time. The end of gay? Well, maybe. But not yet.