If scholarship dealing with US LGBT history demonstrates anything, it demonstrates that social movements dedicated to the project of gender and sexual emancipation often depend for their energy and ideological coherence upon conceptions of embodied and erotic freedom that are both uncompromising and uncompromised. At the same time, existing literature also reveals that many of the most obnoxious constraints on queer people and queer life have taken the form of de jure or de facto prohibitions against comparatively minor forms of personal or erotic expressiveness. For example, throughout much of the twentieth century, furtively engaging in public sex was arguably less risky for many men in the United States than openly kissing or holding hands with one another in public view. While this phenomenon can be explained in terms of the history anti-queer policing, it does suggest the importance of thinking about scale and intensity in any discussion about the pursuit of gender and sexual liberation—whether in the past, the present, or the future. This paper explores the significance of what might be referred to as lesser intimacies where the history of queer world making is concerned.