This chapter traces queer and trans North American memoir through the long twentieth century by engaging the reality that for the majority of people in the majority of that period sexual identities did not adhere in a straight/gay binary and gender identities did not adhere in a cis/trans binary. To answer the challenge posed by this historical reality, this chapter proposes a theory of queer and trans memoir rooted in the racializing and classed gendering regimes and sexual arrangements of the period. This theory then guides the chapter through its engagement with the minoritized works of queer and trans memoir, skirting the white bourgeois gay male genealogy from Oscar Wilde to Edmund White that has too often been proffered as the geneology of LGBT literature.

This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

Ngô explores the variegated roles that imperialism played as a tool to inspire forms of Black politics. Imperialism helped to define a method for how the queer writers of New York challenged the construction of identity categories that shaped the social order. Through a study of orientalist objects, characters, and the shaping of a queer black politics, Ngô examines touchstone works by the eras most important writers, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, the essay uncovers a range of methods and politics behind queer black creative arts. While some authors used imperial logic to create a queer Black aesthetic and expose the meanings assigned to race, gender difference, and nonnormative sexualities, others were inspired by anitcolonial movements to push back on the state, challenging law, policing, and incarceration.

This essay explores how the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a tremendous reorganization of how Americans thought about identity, especially queer identity. The author discusses the activism of homosexual organizers who worked against state repression and then traces the shifting ways Cold War-era novels, plays, and poetry take up the subject of queerness and re-imagine the social possibilities for the homosexual citizen. The work of Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin portrays same-sex desire as a social problem and records an overwhelming anxiety about the characters who are aligned with such desires. Later texts by writers such as Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga situate same-sex desire as a means of radical critique and as a site of connection. They make legible the active repression of gender and sexual nonconformity. This essay illustrates how ideas of queer freedom arise and transform in the shadow of repression.

In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

American scholar and theorist David M. Halperin convincingly reveals the correlations between gay subjectivity and the Broadway musical and shows how the aesthetic form of the genre is in itself prototypically queer. Additionally, musicals can impart a sense of shared identity and cultural connections that ease the coming-out process, and they may confer common bonds within gay communities. Examining key historical eras and significant productions, this chapter builds on the work of D.A. Miller and Halperin and explores the sociological linkages between U. S. gay male culture and the musical, asking how the theatre became associated with male homosexuality. The study analyzes five musicals, Show Boat (1927), West Side Story (1957), La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Fun Home (2013), and A Strange Loop (2019). Each was originally produced in a notable moment in queer history and implicitly or explicitly manifests the tensions of its time. These five musicals reflect distinct ways musicals appeal to gay consumers and suggest opportunities for imagining possibilities of the gay genre as a queer utopia.

The five years or so after World War II saw a wave of novels dealing centrally with male homosexuality. They fall roughly into two groups. First, a group of novels about military life, including Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), covered homosexuality as an important component of their gritty realism. Second, a group of novels set during or after the war, including Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (1946), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), featured gay protagonists and explicitly engaged the plight of the gay minority. The social mobilizations and disruptions of the war and its aftermath enabled new gay visibility and nascent pro-homosexual politics—but also the deepening stigmatization and surveillance of homosexuality. I argue that the novels named above, among others, attempt to work through the ambiguous social position of homosexual identity produced by the war. Oscillating between pathologization and affirmation, these novels typically prove unable to imagine the integration of gay men into society, even as they are energized by a discourse of liberal tolerance.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term ‘transgender’ and prefixial ‘trans’ was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If ‘trans’ as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin ‘queer,’ and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.

This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

Quantification can be a double-edged sword. Converting lived experience into quantitative data can be reductive, coldly condensing complex thoughts, feelings, and actions into numbers. But it can also be a powerful tool to abstract from isolated instances into patterns and groups, providing empirical evidence of systemic injustice and grounds for collectivity. Queer lives and literatures have contended with both these qualities of quantification. Statistics have been used to pathologize queer desire as deviant from the norm, but they have also made it clear how prevalent queer people are, enabling collective action. Likewise for queer literature, which has sometimes regarded quantification as its antithesis, and other times as a prime representational resource. Across the history of queer American literature this dialectical tension between quantification as reductive and resource has played out in various ways, in conjunction with the histories of science, sexuality, and literary style. This chapter covers the history of queer quantification in literature from the singular sexological case study through the gay minority to contemporary queerness trying to transcend the countable.

This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

Vivian Pollak begins with Whitman’s reputation as a sodomite and pederast in his time and ours. She traces the development of this reputation in his early fiction and in the first editions of Leaves of Grass. Although many of Whitman’s contemporaries agreed that the poet had a “sex handicap,” they disagreed about its nature. Pollak argues such “sex handicaps” open a space for thinking about queer community. She offers a close reading of three Dickinson poems that variously engage the concept of sex handicaps and shows that the heteronormative “Master” motif shrunk Dickinson’s erotic range. Eventually, however, even Robert Frost addressed the search for a historical “Master.” Pollak notes Frost’s early interest in “fairies,” describes his disidentification with his self-destructive father, and highlights his bond with his writerly mother, Belle Moodie Frost. Pollak reads Frost’s 1913 poem “Mowing” as a brilliant analysis of erotic conflict and its partial resolution. Although Frost is not usually recognized as a queer writer, Pollak suggests that a collective struggle with “sex handicaps,” however queerly defined, constitutes an important tradition in American poetry and poetics.

The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

This chapter proposes a queer-crip genealogy in American poetry stretching from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to the present day. Through close readings of poems by twentieth-century poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and twenty-first century poets Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a queer disability poetics can be discerned and analyzed. This poetics is deeply concerned with identity, community, intersectionality, and resistance, and is characterized by themes of sexuality, witness, survival, and joy. Throughout this chapter, “crip poetics” is deployed not merely as a descriptor but as an analytic lens applied to poems that have been previously read primarily through understandings of disability as metaphor, alienation, or lack. Crip poetics instead reveals how disability can function as a source of connection, sustenance, and transformation in these poets’ work and in their worlds.

Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.