Some of the main authors that Sedgwick pulls from are Michel Foucault, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Marcel Proust.

According to Sedgwick, this term "has always seemed to have at least some male bias—whether because of the pun on Latin homo = man latent in its etymological macaronic, or simply because of the greater attention to men in the discourse surrounding it".

On publication, the book attracted attention from The Nation, which described it as "a remarkable work of mind and spirit", in which "the literary analyses are excellent".

Nonetheless, it is probably precisely those readers who could learn the most from Epistemology of the Closet, which reestablishes Sedgwick's position as one of the most important thinkers in American gay studies.

The article points out the influence behind Sedgwick's strong disagreement with those who separate gays and straights as "distinct kinds of persons", with no common humanity.

The article later goes on to describe how "Her close readings of Melville's Billy Budd, Wilde's Dorian Gray and of Proust, Nietzsche, Henry James and Thackeray bristle with keen observations relating entrenched fears of same-sex relationships to contemporary gay-bashing and obvious displays of heterosexual or "macho" attitudes".