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This paper examines the relationship between language, culture, and identity in a corpus of gay personal ads collected from two publications in Hong Kong in the three years before the 1997 transition of sovereignty. Gay personal ads are seen äs an "island of discourse," whose marginal nature is reflected in the use of language and in turn reflects issues of marginalization in the larger social context. U sing Fairclough's (1992, 1993) threedimensional model for critical discourse analysis, an attempt is made to uncover the relationship between text structure and issues ofpower/ideology in the society thatproduces the texts. On the level oftext, it wasfound that structural components, particularly the degree of grammatical elaboration, differ according to the stated race or cultural background ofthe authors and their targets. On the level of discourse practice, authors were found to appropriate a variety of "voices"from the larger culture arena, the use of which amplifies or limits the participation ofparticular classes ofindividuals.
Finally, on the level of social practice, the ads were found to reflect and re-create both the racial stereotypes and heterosexist ideology found in the dominant culture.
