This essay examines the work of several poets (including Langston Hughes, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Christopher Leland, Julie Gard, Heiu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, and Rane Arroyo) who engage the Midwest as a resonant source for writing about a host of topics pertaining to queer self-awareness, belonging, and memory. Not unlike the work of recent scholars aiming to dislodge the rural in particular and the Midwest more broadly as a site of unbridled anti-LGBT sentiment and politics, the essay illustrates how these poets refuse essentialist beliefs about the Midwest to instead register the myriad queer histories, cultures, and experiences stemming from America’s heartland. Furthermore, as it considers the inextricable bond between “the Midwest” and “the rural,” the essay illustrates how the urban Midwest additionally requires consideration for the way that cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago are indeed part and parcel of the heartland yet frequently eclipsed by the customary association of gay liberation with major metropolitan coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

Is queerness coeval with American-ness, or with the American version of neoliberalism? The writers explored in this chapter, many of whom have close ties to countries other than the United States, are all preoccupied with these questions. Some, such as Tomasz Jedrowski and Garth Greenwell, implicitly accept queer identity as an American export. Others, including Chinelo Okparanta and Zeyn Joukhadar, fight to carve out small, temporary spaces of resistance to queerness’s entanglements with a certain brand of Western-ness. Others still, such as Shyam Selvadurai and Akwaeke Emezi, create interstitial queer identities that draw on non-Western understandings of selfhood and set them in conversation with mainstream Western queer culture. Focusing on the novel, this chapter engages with writers who identify as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, and trans/ogbanje, hailing from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Germany/Poland, and Syria as well as the United States; while most of them are Anglophone, it also considers some examples of non-Anglophone representations of Western notions of queerness, such as Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.

This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

Comics that represent nonheteronormative sexualities and diverse genders make up part but not the whole of the vital history of queerness in the medium. The emergence and uptake of comics in feminist and LGBTQA spaces tell important, divergent stories about the politics of cultural production and interpretation. A queer account of comics history recalls the development of the medium as a staging ground for fantasies and for challenges to prevailing mores; controversies over the availability of sexually provocative material in print and digital formats; the changing significance of longstanding icons amid generational shifts in youth cultures.

Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.

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.