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.

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.

The Black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde published two full-length pieces of life-writing: The Cancer Journals in 1980, and the biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in 1982. These works, as well as Lorde’s poetry and essays, share the use of embodiment as a source of literary knowledge production. Audre Lorde’s writing locates her embodied experience as a center from which feeling and the narrative accounting for that feeling emanates. Her literary work gestures to a sense of her body as integral for feeling and therefore knowing. The interrelation of feeling and knowing is a key theme within Zami, and reiterates through twentieth and twenty-first century Black queer writing. This chapter provides background on Lorde as a writer, situates Zami alongside Lorde’s other texts, and illustrates some of the narrative moments in Zami which illustrate its use of embodiment in relation to literary knowledge.

This chapter argues that Wagner’s Schopenhauerian understanding of music reveals important aspects of video game music, particularly its erotic dimensions. Armed with, on the one hand, a Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian understanding of music, erotics, and metaphysics, and on the other Kulezic-Wilson’s erotics of cinematic listening, the chapter proposes a Wagnerian erotics of game music on three counts. First, music is an element of the video game medium that dissolves hard boundaries of a single ‘self’ of the player’s identity and takes players ‘out of themselves’. Secondly, games give musical voice to the will, and chart our interaction with it. Finally, games often use musical structures that arrest any broader sense of development, creating a temporal suspension and denial of the will that Wagner sought to reflect in his musical fabric. This chapter concludes with a brief case study that identifies these three elements – identity, the will, and temporality – in The Dig (1995).

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

This chapter discusses how contemporary poets are influenced and inspired by the rise of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, which unleashed a broad surge of poetry by women who began to write openly about their lives and to use their work to directly critique sexism and patriarchy. The chapter examines debates and tensions within women’s poetry of the period, including fraught questions about how poetry might best address female experience, gender roles, race and intersectionality, the relation between poetry and politics, and the tension between more mainstream lyric approaches and more avant-garde experimental feminist poetry. The chapter focuses on a range of representative poets, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, and Kathleen Fraser.

This chapter investigates the literary practices by which twentieth-century Black queer writers have simultaneously utilized, challenged, and modified the generic conventions of autobiography. They do so, Abdur-Rahman argues, to articulate nonnormative pleasures and collective politics that are not readily conveyed by standard autobiographical writing. Because autobiography typically follows the trajectory of a linear narrative of progress, conventional autobiographies capture neither the complicated histories of African diasporic subjects nor the quotidian experiences and social conditions that shape collective Black life and politics. Queer autobiographies typically take the form of the coming-out narrative, which emphasizes the primacy of sexuality over other components of personal identity and other forms of (communal) becoming and belonging. Abdur-Rahman deploys recent reconfigurations of sexual disclosure from "coming out to inviting in" to argue that Black queer life writing redefines the domains around which sexual identities are believed to cohere.

This chapter takes up the haunting of African American lives by examining the role of biomedicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American life writing. For Black people, American biomedicine has always been a haunted house, filled with the ghosts of Black lives lost in the name of racist science and scientific racism. The approach Bailey and Peoples take questions what is knowable under biomedical frameworks. What is prohibited from knowing? What kinds of biographical and historical identities are produced in biomedicine and biomedical narratives? How, if at all, can biomedicine and Black auto/biography produce just and ethical narratives of Black lives and Black futures?

Contemporary queer activism and scholarship builds on foundational work by women of color feminists, black feminists, and black gay artists. Anthologies and films, including This Bridge Called My Back edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and Tongues Untied directed by Marlon Riggs, created languages and practices about difference and care that were central to organizing around AIDS. Working across difference, an organizing principle that pursues shared, liberatory goals without presuming a shared identity, requires creating coalitions within and across national borders that are attentive to the most vulnerable populations. Working across difference also depends on care work – the unglamorous, uncompensated practices of mutual aid, including nursing and mourning. Care work is the often invisible labor that sustained AIDS organizing, particularly as it was performed by grieving gays and lesbians, unable to participate in more visible public actions. As practices central to the emergence of queer politics and cultural production, working across difference and care work remains indispensable to imagining and pursuing freedom.