This article traces the evolving modes of queer print culture in the 20th and 21st century.  From little magazines, avant-garde presses, and overseas publication in the 1920s, through the rise of pulp paperbacks and adult bookstores during the Cold War, through the emergence of feminist and queer presses in the 1990s, to ebooks, social media, and self-publishing in the 21st century, queer writing appears in diverse forms, across the full range of respectability and price points in the publishing ecosystem. Mainstream publishers’ interest in queer lives ebbs and flows, but queer print culture is opportunistic, piggy-backing on any number of niche publishing markets, taking advantage of loopholes and ephemeral publishing trends.  The rise of queer young adult fiction, from the queer fan fiction of the 1990s, suggests the ongoing inventiveness, resilience, and creativity of queer literature as it finds readers and creates new forms of writing and reading.

This chapter studies camp modernism’s debt to the Decadent tradition and the political uses to which the camp modernist aesthetic was put in the early twentieth century. The camp modernism of the 1910s through the 1940s compounds the Decadent models from which it emerged. Turning decisively away from high modernist austerity, fragmentation and ambitious, grand content, camp modernist writers such as Sitwell, Firbank, Benson, and Compton-Burnett composed works preoccupied with small worlds and miniscule conflicts, with the disputes between elderly women in a seaside town or the tiny tyrannies of terrible fathers. They imported the incisive wit, cold derision and rococo sensibilities of fin-de-siècle Decadence into a far more compressed and peripheral universe, one that seemed to operate at a remove from the epic and apocalyptic realm of high modernism. Camp modernism’s frivolity was not, however, entirely apolitical, and it employed the camp aesthetic to queer political ends. Camp modernism’s arch dissections of patriarchal brutality and heteronormativity foregrounded the political utilities of camp as they expressed a Decadent disdain for oppressive and inhibiting forms of power.