The history of sodomy carries a long association with magic, the occult, and alternative forms of knowledge. This connection persists in relation to homosexuality, most obviously in the figure of the fairie (with its associations of enchantment) and with the poetic experience of “magic” or “mystical” forms of alternative knowledge in queer countercultures. This chapter explores the way that two gay San Francisco Bay Area groups — the Beats and the Berkeley Renaissance — took magic, spiritualism, and other forms of alternative knowledge as central to their poetics and authorial practice. Mystical forms of sexuality offer modes of contact at a time when physical intimacy was outlawed and heavily policed in midcentury America. Further, this chapter argues, contemporary poets writing in the wake of these midcentury movements offer new ways to understand how these mystical forms of sexuality constitute institutional critique.

It is conventional to assume that there was an unbreachable gulf between Robert Lowell and the experimental, “raw” poets associated with the broad avant-garde movement known as “The New American Poetry”; that he and poets like Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, and their descendants operated in almost wholly separate universes. However, this chapter argues that Lowell’s relationship with these poets and their work is more extensive, complex, and messy than has often been assumed. As it demonstrates, Lowell’s famous transformation that led to the publication Life Studies was profoundly shaped by his encounter with the avant-garde tradition. Although Lowell’s division of the poetry world into two starkly opposed camps (the “cooked” and the “raw”) quickly became gospel, Lowell actually believed his own new mode to be a bold compromise between the two poles – an attempt to split the difference between "cooked" and "raw," New Critical formalism and the New American Poetry.

This chapter introduces the Beat movement and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. The chapter examines the Beats’ most important formal innovations, thematic concerns, historic importance, and cultural influence by focusing especially on the poet at the center of the Beats, Allen Ginsberg and his controversial groundbreaking poem “Howl” and other major works. The chapter also discusses other Beat poets, including Gregory Corso and Diane Di Prima, as well as issues of gender and race in relation to the Beat movement. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the San Francisco Renaissance and focuses especially on one of the most influential poets of that movement, Jack Spicer.

Queer art and literature demonstrate an awareness of how a permanent war culture constitutes the nation’s social fabric, thus defining the unavoidable contingencies informing LGBTQ+ persons’ desires and subjectivities as citizen-subjects. Along with race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, war culture operates intersectionally. This essay introduces four new approaches to LGBTQ+ art and literatures’ representation of queer subjectivities’ relationship to war culture: the desire for national inclusion and queer fetishizations of the war-state (Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal); activist-poets’ resistances to war culture as heteronormative and white supremacist (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg); the perceived “terrorism” of queer activist arts’ militancy (Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker); and addresses of globalized queer vulnerability after 9/11 and vis-à-vis the climate crisis (Gloria Anzaldúa, Kazim Ali, Ocean Vuong).