This article contributes to theorization of literary history. It views literary history as a seemingly linear temporal narrative which the spatial other interrupts. Focusing on 1970s Taiwanese literature, I note that the spatial other is the actual or imagined US, which loomed large over Taiwan during the Cold War. Inspired by Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, I study the correspondence between spatial orientation (in this article, orientation toward the US) and sexual orientation. I adopt the term ＂American orientation＂ to refer to the fact that gay men as represented in 1970s literature are not only attracted to the US as a promised land but also defined by the allegedly all-American knowledge of male homosexuality, such as the pop psychology of perversion. This article examines not only male homosexual characters in texts but also those who supposedly observe homosexuality, namely narrators in the texts as well as commentators (such as Yeh Shih-tao) on the texts. The article further suggests that this American orientation mobilizes not only the literary characters but also real-life critics. Both groups are obsessed with the tension-cum-cooperation between the actual or imagined US as an exporter of homosexuality and Taiwan as a recipient of the ＂vice＂ from abroad. Determined by the US-Taiwan tension-cum-cooperation, the characters and critics encounter three alterities: national alterity (such as a Taiwanese person in the US or an American commodity in Taiwan), sexual alterity (embodied by a homosexual person either in the US or in Taiwan), and temporal alterity (such as a willful prospect of the future or an indulgence in the stigmatized past, all of which deviate from the linear time of heteronormativity).