In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

American scholar and theorist David M. Halperin convincingly reveals the correlations between gay subjectivity and the Broadway musical and shows how the aesthetic form of the genre is in itself prototypically queer. Additionally, musicals can impart a sense of shared identity and cultural connections that ease the coming-out process, and they may confer common bonds within gay communities. Examining key historical eras and significant productions, this chapter builds on the work of D.A. Miller and Halperin and explores the sociological linkages between U. S. gay male culture and the musical, asking how the theatre became associated with male homosexuality. The study analyzes five musicals, Show Boat (1927), West Side Story (1957), La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Fun Home (2013), and A Strange Loop (2019). Each was originally produced in a notable moment in queer history and implicitly or explicitly manifests the tensions of its time. These five musicals reflect distinct ways musicals appeal to gay consumers and suggest opportunities for imagining possibilities of the gay genre as a queer utopia.

The five years or so after World War II saw a wave of novels dealing centrally with male homosexuality. They fall roughly into two groups. First, a group of novels about military life, including Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), covered homosexuality as an important component of their gritty realism. Second, a group of novels set during or after the war, including Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (1946), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), featured gay protagonists and explicitly engaged the plight of the gay minority. The social mobilizations and disruptions of the war and its aftermath enabled new gay visibility and nascent pro-homosexual politics—but also the deepening stigmatization and surveillance of homosexuality. I argue that the novels named above, among others, attempt to work through the ambiguous social position of homosexual identity produced by the war. Oscillating between pathologization and affirmation, these novels typically prove unable to imagine the integration of gay men into society, even as they are energized by a discourse of liberal tolerance.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term ‘transgender’ and prefixial ‘trans’ was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If ‘trans’ as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin ‘queer,’ and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.

This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

Quantification can be a double-edged sword. Converting lived experience into quantitative data can be reductive, coldly condensing complex thoughts, feelings, and actions into numbers. But it can also be a powerful tool to abstract from isolated instances into patterns and groups, providing empirical evidence of systemic injustice and grounds for collectivity. Queer lives and literatures have contended with both these qualities of quantification. Statistics have been used to pathologize queer desire as deviant from the norm, but they have also made it clear how prevalent queer people are, enabling collective action. Likewise for queer literature, which has sometimes regarded quantification as its antithesis, and other times as a prime representational resource. Across the history of queer American literature this dialectical tension between quantification as reductive and resource has played out in various ways, in conjunction with the histories of science, sexuality, and literary style. This chapter covers the history of queer quantification in literature from the singular sexological case study through the gay minority to contemporary queerness trying to transcend the countable.

This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

Vivian Pollak begins with Whitman’s reputation as a sodomite and pederast in his time and ours. She traces the development of this reputation in his early fiction and in the first editions of Leaves of Grass. Although many of Whitman’s contemporaries agreed that the poet had a “sex handicap,” they disagreed about its nature. Pollak argues such “sex handicaps” open a space for thinking about queer community. She offers a close reading of three Dickinson poems that variously engage the concept of sex handicaps and shows that the heteronormative “Master” motif shrunk Dickinson’s erotic range. Eventually, however, even Robert Frost addressed the search for a historical “Master.” Pollak notes Frost’s early interest in “fairies,” describes his disidentification with his self-destructive father, and highlights his bond with his writerly mother, Belle Moodie Frost. Pollak reads Frost’s 1913 poem “Mowing” as a brilliant analysis of erotic conflict and its partial resolution. Although Frost is not usually recognized as a queer writer, Pollak suggests that a collective struggle with “sex handicaps,” however queerly defined, constitutes an important tradition in American poetry and poetics.

The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

This chapter proposes a queer-crip genealogy in American poetry stretching from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to the present day. Through close readings of poems by twentieth-century poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and twenty-first century poets Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a queer disability poetics can be discerned and analyzed. This poetics is deeply concerned with identity, community, intersectionality, and resistance, and is characterized by themes of sexuality, witness, survival, and joy. Throughout this chapter, “crip poetics” is deployed not merely as a descriptor but as an analytic lens applied to poems that have been previously read primarily through understandings of disability as metaphor, alienation, or lack. Crip poetics instead reveals how disability can function as a source of connection, sustenance, and transformation in these poets’ work and in their worlds.

Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

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 exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

This essay on the American literary history of trans before the inception of modern transness examines such practices and their critiques prior to modern technologies and taxonomies of trans subjecthood. By reading slave narratives, poetry, short fiction, and other genres from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the chapter unravels the preoccupation with individual figures as trans or otherwise gender diverse in order to highlight how the uneven processes of colonial biopolitics attempt to discipline the messiness of lived collective expressions and embodied experiences. By foregrounding works on transing and gendering by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian writers alongside writings better known about white gender nonconformity, this chapter unsettles the racial innocence of transness and triumphalist claims about gender variance as universal. Through attending to structures that produce embodied legibility and practices of meaning-making, the aim is to orient readers to historically informed and theoretically nuanced ways of reading American literature before the twentieth century against tendencies to approach transness through the overrepresentation of whiteness.

The chapter examines imaginative writing about AIDS in light of improved medical treatments for HIV, suggesting that every example of AIDS literature functions as a time capsule documenting its historical moment. Yet, the literature of AIDS is haunted by unfinished pasts that scramble its temporalities and unfix its historical locations. This chapter introduces and conceptualizes an emerging “literature of PrEP” (pre-exposure prophylaxis) in work by Jericho Brown, Matthew Lopez, Jacques Rancourt, and Sam Sax, showing how developments in biomedicine have inspired diverse literary reflections on the epidemic’s four-decade history. As exemplified by Lopez’s epic play The Inheritance, PrEP literature engages crucial questions concerning what one queer generation inherits from, or owes to, another. The chapter argues that, in contrast to scientific or sociological accounts of HIV/AIDS, literary representation is uniquely effective at capturing the haunted quality of AIDS writing because it can reveal how ostensibly outmoded forms of the past persist in the present.

This chapter explores interactions among sexual scientific models of homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their uses in American fiction during the same era. The medical framework had a less pervasive influence than the historical research sometimes suggests. Queer-inflected writing in the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1930s features a varied cast of characters, ranging from winsome youths who fall under the spell of an older, trollish brute; to tortured souls striving to understand themselves and to be understood by others; to enigmatic figures who charm and fascinate everyone around them without offering much in return; to fey, frantic queens who’ll do anything for a laugh. Many of these characters might be taken as expressions of a queer, and even specifically homosexual, identity—but they often bear few if any signs of medicalization unless we contend that all identity-based conceptions of sexuality are necessarily rooted in a medical framework. If we ask what the concept of medicalization contributes, such that it helps to make sense of these works, one answer is that the medical case history, in particular, exhibits generic features that queer fiction borrowed, imitated, satirized, questioned, challenged, and sometimes ignored.

This chapter traces a strand of contemporary queer American drama that replays key figures and texts of the modernist era. With its recurrent return to canonical works and figures of literary and theatrical modernism, this late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century drama literalizes Marvin Carlson’s notion that theatre is a fundamentally haunted art, in this case by the queer figures and texts of its cultural past, and resonates with Carla Freccero’s view of spectrality as a mode of queer historiography. Adaptations, too, are ghostly, haunted, as Linda Hutcheon notes, by their source texts and dependent on repetition and change. In the contemporary queer replays, the modernist era serves as a touchstone against which to consider continuity and change in the historical and cultural representation of gender and sexuality. Queer modernism thus haunts contemporary queer drama, often literalizing this haunting by featuring ghosts. This chapter considers linked works spanning these two temporalities to suggest key moments in and features of the history of queer American drama, and theatre’s role in representing and reimagining how queer lives have been, are, and might be lived.