This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

Leticia Ridley centers on Black Queer drama. After briefly discussing the influential legacies of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, she proceeds to offer a close analysis of select works of Tarell Alvin McCraney (Choir Boy), Robert O’Hara (Bootycandy), Aziza Barnes (BLKS), and Christina Anderson (How to Catch Creation). She reminds the reader of the importance of attending to intersectional experiences as she addresses plays set variably in a private school, church, and nightclub featuring characters of differing social classes.