As a socially and politically engaged composer, Leonard Bernstein created works for the stage that dramatize and explicate the changing status of women, gender relations, and heteronormative sexuality in the society around him. His Trouble in Tahiti (1951), for all its parodic hilarity, constitutes a powerful critique of bourgeois marriage under McCarthyism and establishes the garden as a recurring trope in his subsequent theatrical compositions. The woman-authored Wonderful Town (1953) turns a nostalgic eye on working women in 1930s Greenwich Village, and, elsewhere in Manhattan, West Side Story (1957) both advances the garden trope and gives us Anita, the wise and powerful Latina. In Trouble in Tahiti’s sequel, A Quiet Place (1983) the garden returns musically and textually to prompt a loving reconciliation between non-binary characters and the family patriarch, brokered by a woman.

This chapter studies the expression of queerness, gender and sexual identity, and diversity in comics and graphic novels. It identifies several stages in the history of the medium, from earlier coded or implicit representations of queer identities designed to circumvent the Comics Code Authority to increasingly and openly acknowledged visualizations of non-heteronormative subject matters in contemporary works. The chapter offers close readings of various coming-out narratives that use the graphic memoir form as a space for self-excavation and self-disclosure, drawing connections with a wider social of familial context (Howard Cruse, David Wojnarowicz, and especially Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home catapulted queer graphic novels into the mainstream). It also contrasts the “normalization” approach of mainstream publishers, who focus on diversity and support equality by featuring queer characters in ensemble casts, albeit at the risk of presenting a superficial image of queerness, and the more exclusive focus of alternative publishers and individually produced comics-zines, more centered on personal experiences.

Chapter 6 summarizes the changes to medical care in recent years. There is now a greater recognition that the projected social and psychological challenges of genital variations cannot be fixed by surgery. The first international consensus statement on intersex was published in 2006. The statement makes a number of recommendations to improve care. Controversially however, a new term disorders of sex development (and, later, differences in sex development, or DSD) was introduced to replace intersex and hermaphroditism. Biotechnological developments have been advancing rapidly. More has been learned about “normal” and “abnormal” sex development. However, parents still struggle to talk to children about their bodily variations, young people still worry about getting into relationships, childhood genital surgery is still considered the only way out of stigmatization, psychological expertise is still a low priority in specialist services and the huge potential of peer support is not fully realized.

Patrick Mullen returns to familiar textual moments to discover new forms of Joyce’s subversion of dominant discourses. He detects in moments in “The Dead” such as Lily’s exchange with Gabriel, Molly Ivors’ discussion with Gabriel, and Gabriel’s thoughts on Michael Furey a kind of queerness he associates with “heteronormative failure”: the refusal to marry, the rejection of conventional gender roles, and the experience of homoerotic desire. Adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the sexual closet, he writes of the pantry as the emblem and at times the literal location in Joyce’s story of these alternative behaviors. He traces the subtle presence of these non-normative behaviors in the story’s free indirect discourse; in contrast to the unfettered access to an individual’s thoughts purportedly offered by the stream of consciousness, “The Dead” contains in its conventional third-person narrative voice marginalized perspectives that form unexpected alliances across the globe.

Scholars such as Ian Smith, Jennifer Rahim, Nadia Ellis, Kezia Page, Rosamond King, and Timothy Chin have debunked the idea that sex and sexuality were either peripheral to or absent from the concerns of writers of the 1920s to 1970s. An examination of the sociocultural and literary-discursive mores that may have shaped the codes by which writers and critics addressed sexual issues enables an important re-evaluation of the relationship between literary works and the politics of respectability and heteronormativity often associated with the anglophone Caribbean. This examination attends to treatments of sex and sexuality that engage with nationalism, social status, queer desire, and cultural identity, and considers whether, how, and why the literary representations shifted at different points during this period and among different language traditions.

This chapter explores discriminatory language with regard to sexual orientation and sexuality. Starting with the story of playwright Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment, we look at the history of criminalizing same-sex attraction. Ways of talking about same-sex sexuality over time are discussed, both in-group and out-group, and the use of coded language, such as Polari. Slurs are treated, as well as the reclamation of some of these terms, especially queer and gay. We look at historical and contemporary cases of homophobia in language from popular culture and the media.