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20 LGBTQ Collections of Poetry, Short Stories, and Essays

Some of our favorite new collections of short-form writing by queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming authors.

Almost Home by Madison Kuhn, the Instagram-famous poet and author of Please Don't Go Before I Get Better , is a mesmerizing new collection of poems and prose exploring the meaning and concept of "home," and the process of discovering it within one's self. At 23, Kuhn had already lived in 24 places. Almost Home is her attempt to reconcile her feelings of displacement in the world and achieve at least an emotional and spiritual sense of permanence and stability. Told from the framework of a figurative house, from front porch to bedroom, Kuhn takes you on a spellbinding journey through some of the most intimate parts of her life -- from childhood traumas to learning how to give and receive love. (Gallery Books) -- DG

We Still Leave a Legacy by Philip Robinson is a moving collection of verses by the award-winning poet and well-known activist, dedicated to his own friends and loved ones who transitioned from this world due to HIV/AIDS, cancer, or some other life-altering, debilitating condition. The Black gay writer actually began writing the book nearly 30 years ago when he started his lasting role as a volunteer and activist for HIV/AIDS causes. This touching memoriam, now available in paperback, lovingly gives honor to the many in Robinson's life who were gone from this realm too soon. (We Still Leave a Legacy Press) -- DG

Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson, the renowned queer spoken-word poet, is a captivating collection of writings that take a delicately nuanced and artistic look at gender, love, heartbreak, and family -- in addition to being a book of protest. Within her exciting prose, Gibson fiercely tackles some of today's most pressing and controversial issues as a society. Whether she's lashing out at gun violence, homophobia, or white supremacy, the winner of the first Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2008 goes right for the jugular with her powerful and unapologetic style. (Button Poetry) -- DG

Boss Broad by Megan Volpert, the acclaimed queer feminist teacher, poet, and author, is a new collection of over 40 of her most riveting poems in which she creatively utilizes iconic pop-culture references, from Bruce Springsteen lyrics to Steven Colbert and Patti Smith mentions. "I like working behind enemy lines to knock down powerful, sinister people," Volpert recently told Arts ATL . "In their place, I put queer feminism with splashy, campy, rock 'n' roll attitude." Don't miss out on this timely and exciting commentary that flips the script on an antiquated, patriarchal mindset with brilliant, insightful results. (Sibling Rivalry Press) -- DG

Aviva-No by Shimon Adaf, originally written in Hebrew, is a small collection of poems that artfully combines contemporary Hebrew, Arabic, and Old Armaic languages with ancient biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic text. Much of the prose focuses on Adaf's perspective as a member of Israeli society and the daily violence he's witnessed, as well as his sister's untimely death at 43. Now carefully translated into English (alongside its original Hebrew) by Yael Segalovitz in this new paperback edition, all can devour Adaf's often surreal and though-provoking writings. (Alice James Books) -- DG

Feed by Native-American poet Tommy "Teebs" Pico continues to prove his mastery of longform poetry with his fourth installment in a series of short books ( IRL , Nature Poem , and Junk ) that carry on a single narrative. In the semi-autobiographical series, we've seen the narrator through an intense love affair, and its eventual demise. Now in Feed , we witness our protagonist struggle with the aftermath of these events, mixing authentically modern cultural touchstones with thoughts of deep introspection. And lots of humor. Focusing on his relationships with culture and food, or lack thereof due to his post-colonization existence as an Indigenous person, Pico delivers an insightful, often hilarious, and too-rarely-told perspective of modern Native American life. (Tin House Books) -- DG

Frame of Mind: Punk Photos and Essays from Washington D.C. and Beyond, 1997-2017 photographed by Antonia Tricarico captures the gritty heart and soul of the late '90s punk scene in all its sweaty, raging glory. Focusing on bands born out of the D.C. area -- like Fugazi, Deep Lust, Lungfish, and Stinking Lizaveta -- this decadent coffee table book also features dozens of bands and artists (L7, Babes in Toyland) beyond the D.C. demographic who have drawn inspiration from this particular sect of punk. Though the photos feature artists of all genders, the fascinating essays that accompany them were penned by an impressive roster of women in rock (Joan Jett, Alice Bag, and Lori Barbero, to name a few). These writings, alongside renowned rock photographer Tricarico's unforgettably visceral images, make you feel like you've won the ultimate backstage pass. (Akashic Books) -- DG

Delicate Tiger. Ferocious Snowflake. by Christopher Soden is a carefully chosen selection of the famed critic's reviews of theatrical productions. Whereas other reviewers often focus almost primarily on what did or did not work in a staging, Soden approaches from a different point of view. His perspective focuses instead on what he finds uplifting in a production, with purpose as much as execution. As a result, his reviews are less an attempt to shape reaction to a particular performance as much it is to subtly realign the perspective and perception in general of the audience. This unique view of the reviewer as a more priest than judge has endeared him to both his devoted readers as well as the professionals who stage the productions. In addition to teaching and writing reviews, Soden's Queer Anarchy performance piece won the Dallas Voice 's award for Best Stage Performance. (Lulu) -- Donald Padgett

Step Lightly by Kendall Klym, PhD, is a powerhouse collection of 15 short stories exploring the art of dance, movement, and the ongoing journey of connecting our hearts, souls, and bodies. A former professional ballet dancer, Klym channels the power of self-expression through dance in an array of human tales -- from an amateur ballerina in her 40s who forms a bond with her dance class, to a woman with a broken marriage whose newfound love for belly dancing sparks a sexual awakening, to a fantasy tale of a magical dessert that summons the ghost of legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova to anyone who eats it. The award-winning storyteller's debut short story collection tickles the imagination while encouraging us to form a better relationship with our bodies. (Livingston Press) -- David Artavia

Running Upon the Wires by Kate Tempest secures the 34-year-old poet's place as one of the greatest young writers today. An incredibly personal collection of poems divided into three parts (The End, The Middle, and The Beginning) is a special experiment crafted beautifully by Tempest to show that love, the driving theme in the book, knows no direction. Her intuitive craftsmanship is on display in various forms of ballads, formal lyrics, and a bit of impetuousness laid out in the form of fragmented sentences beautifully written to represent peace within chaos. A true wordsmith, the London-born poet, playwright, and spoken word performer has managed to create a piece of work that stays ingrained in your mind long after putting it down. (Bloomsbury Publishing) -- DA

The Moth Presents Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible edited by Catherine Burns brings everything we love about the acclaimed radio show and podcast, The Moth , into a suspenseful written narrative. Burns, The Moth 's long-time artistic director, brought together people from across the globe to offer their tales of when they had to face the odds, and won. All stories were handpicked from the best narratives ever told on the hit show, meticulously translated for the page. A true emotional ride from start to finish, Occasional Magic will make you laugh, cry, and ponder about how fascinating humankind really is. (Crown Archetype) -- DA

Whereas is Layli Long Soldier's debut collection of poetry highlighting the cultural erasure of Native Americans by the United States. Its unapologetically strident and evoking language shines a light on the broken promises and evolving barriers the government has placed on Native tribes for centuries. Originally published in 2017 and now available in paperback, the Oglala Sioux author's collection of poems is still relevant today and is beautifully expressed through complex historical narratives. The winner of the 2016 Whiting Writers' Award, Long Soldier's work justifiably raises our level of consciousness to new heights. (Graywolf Press) -- DA

Heed the Hollow is Malcolm Tariq's captivating collection of poetry beautifully examining what it means to simply... be. More specifically, the poet explores the full scope of how to rebuild ourselves from the in and out, to be full while at the same time being hollow, to be aware of our humanity, our Blackness, our sexuality, while at the same acknowledging our past, present, future, and what it all means. With deeply moving metaphors and sharp imagery with backdrops of the American South, Tariq plants an emotional seed that dares us to examine our history while remaining conscious of our present path. (Graywolf Press) -- DA

This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt is an anthology of poems from Canada's first First Nations Rhodes Scholar. Describing himself as "one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative," his poems upset genre and effortlessly play with form. They pave a path for a new perspective and interpretation on queer and decolonial theory, and Indigenous poetry in Native America. His words leap from the page as they challenge coloniality of the present, and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms. Equal parts manifesto and memoir, This Wound Is a World is an introspective call to turn to love and sex to understand the plight of Indigenous peoples, and offer a path to dealing with sadness and pain without sacrificing history and identity. Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation and has won numerous awards for his poetry. (University of Minnesota Press) -- DP

Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons is a lush, gritty, dark, and delicious collection of short stories by the award-winning writer. Told with wit, style, and unapologetic honesty, Parsons's writings unearth the places deep within ourselves that most of us prefer would remain buried. From describing cool, indifferent family dinners to hot-blooded trysts at a Texas pay-by-hour motel, Parsons creates vivid scenes most can relate to at some point or other in their lives, whether they'd like to admit it or not. Queer feminist author and critic Carmen Maria Machado ( Her Body and Other Parties ) called the stories in Black Light "grimy and weird, surprising, [and] utterly lush." (Penguin Random House) -- DG

Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro by Mari Yoshihara offers a fresh perspective on the life of world-renowned classical musician Leonard Bernstein. Through never-before-seen letters from two relatively unknown Japanese individuals, readers get an intimate peak into the famous maestro's personal life and relationships. One of the individuals in question was Kazuko Amano, a woman who started sending Bernstein fan letters in 1947 and grew to become a close family friend. The second set of letters were from Kunihiko Hashimoto, a young man who fell in love with Bernstein in the late '70s and eventually became his business representative. Through reading these beautifully written letters, one can see the powerful impact and influence the man, and his music, had on those around him. (Oxford University Press) -- DG

Allen Ginsberg: South American Journals (January-July 1960) edited by Michael Schumacher is the second of a three-volume series of Ginsberg's personal journals (the first volume being Iron Curtain Journals and the final volume, The Fall of America Journals , is forthcoming). Ginsberg went to South America in 1960 to attend a literary conference and ended up staying for an adventuresome six months. Writing more during this period than in any of his other journals, the great Beat poet's entries are peppered throughout with poetry, notes on his dreams, and other random existential thoughts and ideas. In the South American Journals, Ginsberg recounts his travels through Chile, Peru, particularly his visit to Machu Picchu, and his quest for the source of ayahuasca (also called yage ) -- a natural hallucinogen made from local vine that was recommended by his friend and fellow adventurer, William S. Burroughs. (University of Minnesota Press) -- DG

Nonbinary Memoirs of Gender and Identity edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane is a collection of first-person narratives that explore the lives of individuals across the gender spectrum. The book is divided into five sections ranging from stories that help define our concepts of gender and representation to the development of community and a greater acceptance in the mainstream. The reader will find plenty with which to connect and identify. There are stories dealing with self-realization and coming out, creating one's own person, learning how to stand up, and also stand out. Contributors to Nonbinary Memoirs reads like a who's-who list of LGBTQ , trans, and genderqueer icons -- including activist and author (and the first to coin the term "gender queer") Riki Williams, journalist S.E. Smith, scholar Genny Beemyn, author and social media personality Jeffrey Marsh, poet Christopher Soto, and many others. The voices given agency here speak to everyone who has ever questioned their identity and the rigid roles assigned to them by a non-accepting society. (Columbia University Press) -- DP

Evolution by Eileen Myles, now in paperback, is a collection of the writer's lively and wonderfully creative poems. From the author of the wildly inventive and critically acclaimed Afterglow , a clever dog memoir, comes a fresh collection of vivid prose that conjures everything from exotic imagery of far-off travels to everyday walks through Marfa, Texas, with Honey the pitbull. Don't miss this latest treasure from the queer, award-winning poet who prefers they/them pronouns and has authored over 20 books, including Chelsea Girls and Cool for You . (Grove Paperback) -- Desiree Guerrero

Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist, a Cree, Two-Spirit, trans femme poet and sex educator whom you may know from a widely circulated piece for Them on what it's like to be an Indigenous trans woman on Thanksgiving. This impressive debut collection of Twist's poetry was initially part of Arsenal Pulp Press's series of works exclusively written by queer BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) writers. In Disintegrate/Dissociate , she delves into the intricacies of being human, not shying away from topics like death and transformation. With sparse yet powerful words, Twist's poems explore the depths of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity -- both cultural and sexual. Balancing her rage with delicacy and tenderness, she navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman in our modern world. "With few words, she conveys so much about the legacies of colonization, the terror of transmisogyny, and the colossal force of them both," said Alok Vaid-Menon, transfeminine activist author of Femme in Public , adding, "In a political moment hell-bent on erasing Indigenous trans voices, Twist's Disintegrate/Dissociate is here to stay." -- DG

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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The Queer Bible: A beautiful essay collection on queer trailblazers through history, including words from Elton John, Munroe Bergdorf, Graham Norton, Paris Lees, and more Kindle Edition

‘we stand on the shoulders of giants. now we learn their names.’.

THE QUEER BIBLE is a collection of essays written by queer icons, about the queer trailblazers throughout history who inspired them.

From Elton John on Divine to Graham Norton on Armistead Maupin; Russell Tovey on David Robilliard to Lady Phyll on Moud Goba; Tan France on the Queer Eye cast to Mae Martin on Tim Curry, today’s queer heroes write about the icons that provided a creative inspiration to them. Other contributors include Amelia Abraham, Paula Akpan, Courtney Act, Munroe Bergdorf, Mykki Blanco, Joseph Cassara, David Furnish, Paul Flynn, Paris Lees, Juliet Jacques, Gus Kenworthy, Freddy McConnell, Paul Mendez, Mark Moore, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hanne Gaby Odiele and Matthew Todd. Each essay is accompanied by exclusive, bespoke illustrations by queer or ally artists, to create a truly beautiful celebration of queer culture.

Based on the popular website QueerBible.com, founded by model and activist Jack Guinness, this timely collection, edited by him, continues his mission – to create a space dedicated to the celebration of queer history.

The Queer Bible is a love letter to the LGBTQI+ community and its allies.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher HQ
• Publication date June 17, 2021
• File size 59641 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

About the author.

In a recent profile, British GQ described Jack Guinness as The Coolest Man in Britain. Cambridge educated Jack Guinness began his career as a model, starring in global campaigns for brands such as L'Oreal, Dunhill and Dolce and Gabbana. As a writer, style and fashion commentator, he has contributed to the Sunday Times Style , Vogue Italia , The Guardian , British GQ , Gentleman's Journal and Tatler . He also contributed an essay to former Stonewall Chief Executive Baroness Ruth Hunt's essay collection on faith and sexuality entitled, Queer Prophets , alongside writers such as Dustin Lance Black.

Jack has developed and starred in digital content for Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Vogue, Vice and GQ, travelled to Japan to star in Channel 4's anarchic World Of Weird series, and hosted live social media takeovers for brands such as Alexa Chung and Hugo Boss. Guinness is proud to be on the British Fashion Councils advisory Style Council for London Fashion Week Men's, and passionately champions young designers and British manufacturing. Jack was recently announced as a Contributing Editor for British GQ magazine.

Jack publically 'came out' in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, launching the LGBTQ+ community he founded, The Queer Bible which celebrates the works and lives of the global queer community. The Queer Bible podcast with guests including, Sir Ian Mckellen, activist Munro Bergdorf and Drag Race's Courtney Act is being released towards the end of 2021.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08N5M8G28
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HQ; 1st edition (June 17, 2021)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 17, 2021
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 59641 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages

About the author

Jack guinness.

British GQ’s recent feature on Jack Guinness asked… 'Is he really the coolest man in Britain?' Short answer? No... but he tries his best!

Cambridge educated Jack Guinness began his career as a model, starring in global campaigns for brands such as L'Oreal, Dunhill and Dolce and Gabbana.

As a style and fashion commentator, he has contributed to The Sunday Times Style, Italian Vogue, The Guardian, Gentleman’s Journal and Tatler and was recently announced as a Contributing Editor to British GQ magazine.

Jack is the founder of LGBTQ+ community The Queer Bible which celebrates the works and lives of the global queer community: www.queerbible.com Each entry on the site is accompanied by an original illustration by a young LGBTQ+ artist. The Queer Bible Podcast is coming in late 2021 with guests including Sir Ian McKellen, Reimagining Gender's Lisa Kenny, Munroe Bergdorf, and Drag Race's Courtney Act.

Jack is very proud to be a member of The Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm. The Mayor has created the Commission to help ensure London’s achievements across the full sweep of the capital’s rich and diverse history are properly reflected around the city.

In digital, Jack has developed and appeared in content for Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Vogue, Vice and GQ and hosted live social media takeovers for brands such as Alexa Chung and Hugo Boss. He's a jack of all trades, master of none... in his varied career, he's hosted Burlesque nights in London's East End, appeared in numerous cult music videos and worked as a DJ, once opening for Lady Gaga and Mark Ronson at a secret gig in London's iconic Moth Club.

Jack also wrote this himself, in the third person.

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LGBTQ Reads

Memoirs/personal essays.

These classifications are based on how I believe the authors identify, but if a title is miscategorized, please let me know and I will be happy to move it.

Gay Author/Topics

• I Can’t Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux
• The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood by Richard Blanco
• I Have Something to Tell You   by Chasten Buttigieg
• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
• Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin
• Officer Clemmons by François S. Clemmons ( Amz )
• Boy Erased by Garrard Conley
• Before Pictures by Douglas Crimp
• The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing, and Coming Out by William Dameron
• Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
• Asylum by Edafe Okporo
• I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein
• Naturally Tan by Tan France
• Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the ’70s & the ’80s by Brad Gooch
• Rapture Practice: Growing Up Gay in an Evangelical Family by Aaron Hartzler (YA)
• Brave Face by Shaun David Hutchinson (YA)
• Maori Boy by Witi Ihimaera
• All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson (YA)
• How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones
• I am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell
• Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East by Benjamin Law
• Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin
• Leg: the Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It by Greg Marshall
• Borrowed Time by Paul Monette
• Little & Often by Trent Preszler
• Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell ( Amz )
• Body Counts by Sean Strub

City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s by Edmund White

Lesbian Author/Topics

• Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison
• The Family Tooth  by Ellis Avery
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
• A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby
• The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin
• When We Were Outlaws   by Jeanne Cordova
• The Times I Knew I Was Gay by Eleanor Crewes
• Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman by Laura Kate Dale
• How Poetry Saved My Life by Amber Dawn
• Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
• Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi
• Save Yourself by Cameron Esposito
• Prairie Silence  by Melanie Hoffert
• Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec ( Amz )
• Uncovered : How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home by Leah Lax
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
• * Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza
• One Life by Megan Rapinoe
• Ma and Me by Putsata Reang
• The End of San Francisco by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
• Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love & Revolution   by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa
• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
• Like Me by Chely Wright

Bi s exual Author/Topics

• A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernandez
• Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow
• Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming
• Baggage by Alan Cumming
• The Yards Between Us by R. K. Russell

Queer Author/Topics

These authors ID themselves and/or their work as queer or do not label their sexuality.

• Angry Queer Somali Boy by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
• A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
• Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
• Hola Papi by John Paul Brammer
• I Felt the End Before it Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness by Daniel Allen Cox
• We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib
• * Mama: A Black, Queer Woman’s Journey to Motherhood by Nikkya Hargrove
• Wow, No Thank You. by Samantha Irby
• Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
• Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T’kira Madden
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Mochado
• I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro
• * The Dead Don’t Need Reminding by Julian Randall
• * Becoming History  by Hugh Ryan
• When They Tell You to Be Good by Prince Shakur
• Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism by Elsa Sjunneson
• The Chiffon Trenches by Andre Leon Talley
• Against Memoir by Michelle Tea
• Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family and Identity   by Candace Walsh
• Madder: a Memoir in Weeds by Marco Wilkinson
• The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg
• On Your Right, Fire and Brimstone by Zach Zimmerman

Transgender/Non-Binary Author

• Some Assembly Required by Arin Andrews (YA)
• The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Malcolm Belc
• Butch is a Noun by S. Bear Bergman
• Blood, Marriage, Wine, Glitter by S. Bear Bergman
• Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard by Alex Bertie (YA)
• Sorted: Growing Up, Coming out, and Finding My Place by Jackson Bird
• Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein
• Trauma Queen by Lovemme Corazon
• Me, Myself, They by Joshua M. Ferguson
• This Body I Wore by Diana Goetsch
• Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn
• Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings
• Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe
• Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace Lavery
• * Both and Neither by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
• Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man by Thomas Page McBee
• Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
• *Brace for Impact by Gabe Montesanti ( Amz )
• Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me by Janet Mock
• * Tender Moments and Tough Lessons: The Journey Through Adoption, Trans Pregnancy, and LGBTQ Parenthood by Trystan Angel Reese
• Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
• Gender Failure   by Rae Spoon & Ivan E. Coyote
• First Spring Grass Fire   by Rae Spoon
• Becoming Eve: My Journey From Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman by Abby Chava Stein
• Fairest by Meredith Talusan
• Hiding My Candy by The Lady Chablis

Intersex Author

• Born Both: An Intersex Life by Hila Viloria
• XOXY by Kimberly Zieselman

Authors of Other Cultural Non-Binary Identities

• The Truth About Me: a Hijra Life Story by A Revathi ( Amz )
• Me Hijra, Me Laxmi by Laxmi ( Amz )

Multi-Author Collections

• Y’all Means All: the Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia ed. by Z. Zane McNeill

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Queer/Adaptation: A Collection of Critical Essays

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David Pellegrini, Queer/Adaptation: A Collection of Critical Essays, Adaptation , Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 157–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaa029

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The fourteen essayists in Queer/Adaptation accept as paradigmatic that queer theory and adaptation studies are mutually reinforcing; that both resist singular categorizations; and that, aside from denoting non-heteronormative identities, ‘to queer’ is to unsettle sociocultural norms and aesthetic conventions. Pamela Demory points to repetition, reception, and performativity as linkages between the essays, but maintains the wide range of adaptive practices and critical methodologies affirms Kamilla Elliott’s observation that since adaptations are ‘theoretically promiscuous’, then ‘theory should follow suit’ (Demory 3). Eschewing moralistic connotations associated with LGBTQ lives, here, promiscuity unyokes binaries of sexuality and gender, while alluding to the intellectual pleasure and possible ‘erotic charge’ of intertextual engagement. By extension, queer/adaptation scholarship should stimulate similar responses; so, in an act of critical promiscuity I read, viewed, or re-experienced all of the material I could locate, seeking pleasure by matching my observations with those of the essayists.

The first of the volume’s three parts focuses on screenwriters and directors’ endeavours to queer material, whether that content is explicit, implicit, or altogether non-existent. Scott Stoddart touches on all three variations in comparing two films by Tom Ford. Whereas the protagonist of Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (2009) is openly gay, neither Nocturnal Animals (2013), nor Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan— the novel upon which it is based—present queer subjects. Rather, Stoddart locates a queer, political aesthetic borne out in both films by: Ford’s vacillation between alienation and engagement via framing and color palettes; adulation of classic Hollywood tropes, especially the films of George Cukor; and grafting his life and design-career experiences onto the texts and imagery. While apropos of A Single Man (and Isherwood), the argument that a visual aesthetic renders Nocturnal Animals queer or political is less convincing. However, Stoddart’s analysis of how the contemporary artworks foregrounding shot-after-shot reflect Ford’s cross-identification with the central female character is worthy of further expansion. I wondered though, if Ford is less beholden to Cukor than to Luchino Visconti, who incorporated visual art towards aesthetic effect and political critique, stamping an imprimatur of queer cultural authorship for gay-identifying filmmakers ever since. A thornier issue crops up in cases where subject matter once reviled for negative stereotyping is recuperated. Mat Daniel shows how the network series Hannibal (2013–15) transformed the franchise first launched in Thomas Harris’s trilogy of novels by inscribing more nuanced permutations of queerness than previous incarnations. Charting the invention of a lesbian subplot and the increasingly obsessive relationship between Hannibal Lecter and FBI agent Will Graham, Daniel argues that same-sex desire queered the heteronormative institutions and relationships represented in the series. Interestingly, this resulted from showrunner Bryan Fuller’s engagement with fan fiction and artworks depicting sexualized images of ‘Hannigram’: a projection of analyst-patient countertransference into the blogosphere. Notwithstanding the high value Daniel places on the series’ intentional inclusivity, I was left questioning how, in a generation since Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), did it become desirable to imagine a queer bromance for a cannibalistic serial killer? Rounding out this section, two essays explore the tragic and comic potentialities of queering. Nick Bamford’s outline of how he transposed the characters and milieu of Madame Butterfly for an original screenplay is noteworthy as the volume’s sole first-hand account of a queering process. By contrast, Tison Pugh’s overview of Barry Sandler’s campy embellishments of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980) acknowledges the over-the-top histrionics of Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak, thus anticipating the volume’s third section.

Concerned with texts that generate multiple adaptations, or adapted texts that draw upon multiple sources, the essays in Part III best exemplify the promiscuity paradigm, particularly as it relates to performativity. Exploring the durable representations of female vampirism—traceable to Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla— Shelby Wilson discovers a floating signifier capable of instantiating a feminist critique of a sub-genre traditionally fixed by the male gaze. Thus, a film like Jesús Franco’s Female Vampire (1973)—with its multiple cuts for different markets (e.g. horror, softcore/hardcore porn), narrative discontinuities, ‘bad’ acting, and serial recycling of dissident female sexuality—generates ‘interstices of resistant viewing’, albeit if read through strategies of ‘ironicized distance’ (196). Covering similar ground, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns examines how Euro-horror reworkings of Hitchcock’s oeuvre reveal adaptation as a ‘process of feedback between works and social contexts’ (210). Grounding his analysis in the Gothic’s preoccupation with non-normative sex, Berns argues that by exposing ‘hidden perversities’ and stripping away the veneer of auteurism, such genre-crossings subvert Hollywood ideologies and high/low critical valuations alike.

Shape-shifted into star vehicles for stage, screen, and opera, the heroine of Alexander Dumas fils’ Camille— an archetype of the ‘fallen woman’ narrative—becomes, for Jamie Hook, an avatar of promiscuity. Hook compares two adaptations—Randy Metzger’s softcore Camille 2000 (1969) and Charles Ludlam’s legendary cross-dressed Ridiculous Theatre Company production—to illustrate a comprehensive overview of camp theory. Created for vastly different audiences, these two cases bolster Hook’s definition of camp as a ‘sensibility, reading strategy and performance style’ resulting from the accretion of queer meanings related to ‘already adapted originals’ (251). Camp reigns supreme in Michael Perez’s analysis of cinematic representations of Truman Capote’s queerness, which having gradually unfolded over multiple adaptations of In Cold Blood , reaches its apotheosis and ‘fabulosity’ in Infamous (2006). This, Perez locates, in the galvanic performance of Toby Jones, and director Douglas McGrath’s coding/de-coding of same-sex attraction to make explicit what was previously subtextual. Maintaining this is an instance where ‘queerness is adapted to the scenario, and not the other way around’ (237), Perez, through bursts of exhilaration and near-breathless declamations, performs the scholarship, celebrating this film’s achievement in showing how ‘after seven lives and almost sixty years of adaptation later…the closet and its discontents shouldn’t have existed in the first place’ (236).

Applications of recent trends in queer theory characterize the essays in Part II—the volume’s strongest section—focused on instances in which boundaries between originals and adaptations are porous, so that ‘the intertextual, palimpsestic relation between (or among) the texts’ predominates (9). Chiara Pellegrini employs the theory of ‘queer touching’ as a metaphor to dissect The Safety of Objects (2001), in which Rose Troche disaggregated A. M. Homes’s collection of thematically related, yet stand-alone short stories to form an integrated screenplay. Just as physical touching can mitigate the isolation and anxieties pervasive in queer experience, Troche’s co-joining of texts transformed the existential loneliness of Homes’s characters by connecting them to a cataclysmic event at the heart of one of her stories. This is, perhaps, the most convincing demonstration of how queering—as process—informs adaptation scholarship, since in this and several other cases in the volume, ‘straight’ relationships eclipse representations of LBGTQ lives, if they appear at all. The concept of ‘queer temporality’ informs three essays, and like ‘touching’, is evidentiary of the mutual concerns of queer and adaptation theories. As Demory notes, adaptive material is often indeterminate, as with Moonlight (2016), based on an unproduced, unpublished play by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Demory demonstrates how director Barry Jenkins manifests queer temporality through a variety of techniques, including the repetition of visual motifs in depicting the ‘three lives’ of the central character, subverting cause-effect linearity as a structural and organizing principle, and by complementing McCraney’s utopian-minded vision of the play as being set in the ‘distant present’. By contrast, durational time is a concern for Whitney Monaghan and Stuart Richards’s comparison of four short ‘coming out’ films subsequently re-made by these young filmmakers as features. The authors maintain that while the ‘rapid bursts’ and open-endedness typical of shorts are conducive to embody the utopian aspects of queer time, the dramaturgical expansion required for features allows for a greater range of sexual identities to be contemplated. Temporality, indeterminacy, and recuperation of controversial material are all subthemes in Queer Thomas’s analysis of Interior. Leather Bar (2013): a conjectural reconstruction of forty minutes of material excised from William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), which even in its abridged form provoked angry protests by New York’s gay community. As Thomas describes it, filmmakers James Franco and Travis Mathews ‘amp up the sex and expose cultural fictions surrounding sexual construction, allowing viewers (as well as Interiors’ cast) to deepen their queer sensibilities’ (122). Thomas borrows the phrase ‘fuck-scripting’ from Franco’s on-camera defense of the project’s improvisational quotient, which along with the documentary-style testimonials of the ‘performers’, disrupt distinctions between documentary/fiction, and performance/identity.

If part of the pleasure of adaptations is their capacity to engender creative acts of comparison and synthesis, it is also true of this collection’s amplification of dialogue between and among texts, even when I could not locate the subjects under investigation. In fact, John Lessard’s overview of the cross-national franchising of Korean Wave drama (Hallyu) is vital for understanding its socioeconomic factors, and reassuring in that Asian markets appear to be increasingly receptive to representations of queer lives. And, though I had no luck finding Ulrike Ottinger’s Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984), Shannon Brownlee’s description of how the film responds to the texts (and histories) it adapts encapsulates many strands of inquiry threaded throughout the volume. While I admit to deriving greater pleasure from the more queer-centric works, and enacted my own ‘ironicized distance’ on more than one occasion (especially with the softcore horror films), by oscillating between criticism and case studies, I found affirmation of my own past and present creative work, and came to a deeper appreciation of how maintaining a queer/adaptation matrix might yield vigorous possibilities for further praxis and scholarship.

Demory , Pamela , ed. Queer/Adaptation: A Collection of Critical Essays . London : Palgrave Macmillan , 2019 .

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The Spinoff

Books November 14, 2021

Celebrating a landmark anthology of queer new zealand writing.

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Out Here is a big, beautifully designed hardback edited by Emma Barnes and Chris Tse, and it marks a watershed moment in queer writing in Aotearoa says Jean Sergent.

My main experience as an artist in Aotearoa is in the theatre, where there is an abundance of queer practitioners and an under-abundance of queer stories. So as a queer artist myself, I tend to assume that art is inherently queer – it’s just that most mainstream stories are about straight men. 

But of course there are a wealth of brilliant queer stories out there. Wouldn’t it be nice if a substantial volume of them were collected in a gorgeous book?

A few years ago, poet Chris Tse and Auckland University Press director Sam Elworthy simultaneously pitched each other the idea that became Out Here. Tse recruited Emma Barnes (this year lauded for their book of poems I Am in Bed with You) as his co-editor, and together they got to work on a volume so overdue it feels stunning that it hasn’t existed before. 

Out Here is a pleasure to hold as well as to read. Across 360 pages the book snapshots such a groundswell of emerging queer writers that not only could it have been hundreds of pages longer, it could probably have run to multiple volumes.

In the introduction, Barnes and Tse write that they were expecting “the pool of writers to consider would be considerable, but modest … The response to our open call was overwhelming, and reinforced the need for such an anthology.” 

They tell me they were inundated with submissions. “W e read and considered about 230 writers,” says Tse. “There are 69 writers in the final anthology. ” Nice.

Only about a third of the writers who submitted were already on the editors’ radar. Gus Goldsack, a New Zealander living in New York City, is among those whom, the editors write, “were completely and delightfully unknown to us”. Goldsack was unpublished until July last year, when Tse (The Spinoff’s poetry editor) selected his work ‘Go North’ as the Friday Poem. Goldsack has three poems in Out Here, each playing with different forms, each beautiful and compelling. 

For my birthday I want to not look like this, to not feel like this, to not live like this, I want to burst into screams on the C train at rush hour but without bothering anyone else. I want to shiver beneath a blanket on Karekare Beach, to look at a waterfall, to run to a car as the rain pours

To Goldsack, overt queerness still feels rare in New Zealand art and literature. While 21st century Aotearoa may sometimes feel like a relatively easy place for queer people, he and I both grew up queer in the era between homosexual law reform and the world domination of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Finding and holding the space for queerness in art, theatre, and literature in Aotearoa is an ecstatic privilege.

Out Here features poetry by the truckload, but also fiction, prose, drama, and activism. Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith’s ‘Stone Femme’ muses on sex work, exhaustion, and the demands of praxis. “Sex work does an excellent job of turning you into a prude. I’m great at talking about sex in a way that’s funny or dispassionate, but I would sooner dive into a wood chipper than admit any actual desire myself.” Pelenakeke Brown’s extraordinary ‘A Travelling Practice’ invokes Sāmoan concepts and practices like vā and tatau. It’s given 10 pages, and these are transformed into a landscape, a body, a map of the keyboard and the self and the interactions between art, culture, and embodiment.

This anthology is a challenge to mainstream media representations of queerness. In the introduction, the editors note dryly: “ We’re exceptionally familiar with tropes of queer unhappiness and we wanted to widen the frame.”

Tse tells me: “W hat this anthology highlights for me is the dynamic range of themes and topics that interest queer writers, and the range of genres they’re working in. Also, a lot of the work is quite experimental. All of this challenges what ‘queer writing’ can be – it isn’t just coming out stories and tragedy. There’s a lot of love and light in this book.” 

As well as introducing new writers, Out Here anthologises our queer elders. Ngahuia te Awekotuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Waikato) has two short stories in the collection, both mellow, funny and heartbreaking. Witi Ihimaera is represented, as of course he must be – the editors chose an excerpt from The Uncle’s Story, which provides a much-needed reminder of New Zealand soldiers’, and especially tāne Māori, experiences in the American war in Vietnam.

As a teenager at Wellington High School, Goldsack studied Ihimaera’s work yet had “no perception of him as a queer writer” until sixth form English, where Witi’s wife, Jane Smiler, was teaching Nights In The Gardens of Spain. Goldsack reflects that, “though semi-autobiographical, Witi wrote the protagonist as Pākehā.” The distance between a time when a gay Māori writer wrote in proxies, to now, and this volume packed with multicultural queer art, seems like a chasm. But it is only a couple of decades.

Barnes reflects on the pressure and responsibility of being tasked with such an important cultural cornerstone. “This was something I felt over and over and over again … But I think that was so crucial to the book being what it is.”

They faced the inevitable editor’s dilemma as well: saying no. “Saying no was miserable. There were writers I wanted to have in there but space was our true limitation.” It was a hard call even to stop reading and get on with the book – they could have kept reading forever. “There’s some writers who aren’t included who have started to gain visibility or make an impact in the year since we finalised the selection, and I hope they’ll be captured in subsequent anthologies.”

There is something delightfully intimate in the alphabetical ordering of the contributors – by first name, rather than last. Running your eyes down the writer list feels like looking at the names of friends. Last names have always felt so patriarchal to me anyway. It’s so much more inherently queer to see first names and think ahh, this is my family.

The writers represented in the anthology encompass the vast, rich, and varied experiences of queerness in Aotearoa. In particular, Rose Lu’s beautiful short essay about masks and contact tracing and racism, and the urgency of Oscar Upperton’s poem ‘Small Talk’ leapt off the page for me:

How’ve you been have you 

mastectomy or

called dyke at a bus stop 

The intersectionality of queer art is on full display. Like the cover art – a heavenly splash of detail from the 2019 oil painting The Thick Skin of a Pronoun, by Jack Trolove – each bite-sized chunk is packed with flavour and texture. Readers will absolutely be buying queer novels, essay collections and books of poetry because of the writing they fall in love with in Out Here.

It is this multiplicity which makes Out Here such a precious taonga, and such a gift to the world. The emerging writers nestled in amongst icons, the multiculturalism of queer Aotearoa, and the sheer variety of passion and story reinforces the diversity and urgency of writing in New Zealand.

As Gus Goldsack put it, writing to me from New York City, “this is not a book of cis voices, it’s not a book of male voices, and it’s not a book of white voices… it’s also not just a book for established voices – perhaps the only thing more surreal than opening the galley proofs and seeing my name alongside such established artists as Witi Ihimaera, Paula Boock and Hinemoana Baker was seeing my name alongside so many of my peers, acquaintances and friends. Emma and Chris have made sure that the lenses through which these stories are told are as diverse, in every way, as the community itself. Ultimately, this book affirms that we are here to tell queer stories as queer people, and not just as people who happen to be queer.”

For me, this intersectionality plays out perfectly in Ruby Solly’s poem ‘Both’. Like much of the work in Out Here, this poem isn’t strictly about queerness, but rather about the multiple worlds that a single person occupies, and the inheritance of culture, place, and emotion. 

I’ve always liked Venn diagrams

The cocoon they make for those of us who walk in two worlds.

The shape of the waka, the porotiti, 

the leaf of the karaka tree 

More Reading

grown from the seed my ancient held in his palms

as he prayed his way across the ocean.

Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa, edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press, $49.99) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books , recently named 2020 International Book Store of the Year, London Book Fair, and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books Wellington or Unity Books Auckland online stores today. 

20 Must-Read Black Authors of LGBTQ Books

Rachel Brittain

Rachel is a writer from Arkansas, most at home surrounded by forests and animals much like a Disney Princess. She spends most of her time writing stories and playing around in imaginary worlds. You can follow her writing at rachelbrittain.com. Twitter and Instagram: @rachelsbrittain

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The phrase “decolonize your bookshelf” has come into common reader vernacular in recent years. What it means is simple: evaluate the kinds of books you’re reading and make sure they aren’t all reflecting a white, western—AKA colonizer—point of view. Beyond that, though, I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re doing enough, or reading widely enough, if you’re reading books that are non-white or non-straight or non-male. But is it really? Because it’s easy to miss the intersection of identities—or miss certain identities entirely—if you accept that as enough. What about nonbinary authors? Black queer authors? Disabled authors? Neurodivergent authors? Queer experiences, for example, don’t necessarily look the same for any two people—especially if one of them is white and another Black.

With Pride Month in the rearview mirror,  it’s also a great time to reexamine your TBR and your bookshelves—make sure the books you’re reading don’t solely reflect one identity, whether one portion of the LGBTQ community or mostly white authors. Diversifying your bookshelf is incredibly important. It widens your worldview, helps you reevaluate ingrained biases and beliefs, and, hopefully, exposes you to incredible new authors and books you might not have discovered if you only ever explored stodgy old lists of classics featuring solely straight cis white authors. And these 20 Black authors of LGBTQ books are a great place to start, exploring experiences, both fictional and non, of what it means to be queer and Black.

They include some of my personal favorites, some classics, and some on my TBR that I still really need to get around to, because I have over 1,000 books on my Goodreads Want-To-Read shelf (bet you can relate). From joyful stories about queer Black girls to memoirs of what it means to be Black and gay, these authors present incredible and affirming stories to read now or anytime.

Rivers Solomon

One of my favorite speculative fiction writers, Rivers Solomon writes about identity, the legacy of generational trauma, family bonds, love, and queerness—all wrapped up in incredible tales of spaceships and mermaids. Their book An Unkindness of Ghosts tells the story of Antebellum horrors repeating themselves on a spaceship. It’s a haunting, powerful read.  The Deep , a novelization inspired by and in collaboration with the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by the hip hop group clipping. develops a mythology for the children of the pregnant African women thrown overboard from slave ships.

Note that both of these books deal with some potentially traumatic subjects, so make sure you look at reviews and trigger warnings before reading if that could be an issue.

Kacen Callender

Kacen Callender is a powerhouse of today’s queer fiction, writing books spanning from middle grade and YA to adult. Their newest book,  Felix Ever After , is a story about a queer, black, trans teen looking for his own happily ever. Most of their books explore queer identity in some way— Hurricane Child, This is Kind of an Epic Love Story , King and the Dragonflies —and explore heartfelt stories of identity and belonging.

N.K. Jemisin

You probably know N.K. Jemisin for her incredible work in SFF (unless you either live under a rock or eschew sci-fi and fantasy altogether) but her writing also often includes powerful queer story lines. Her most recent hit The City We Became , about the living avatars of New York City and its boroughs, includes multiple queer characters fighting hard to save the city they love. Jemisin’s excellent short story collection How Long Til Black Future Month? and fantasy series  The Fifth Season  also feature incredible characters, queer and otherwise.

Jacqueline Woodson

Queer identity is intrinsic to Woodson’s work, as is the beautiful, lyrical prose she’s well known for. Whether exploring adolescence—as in Another Brooklyn —memory and generational identity—as in Red at the Bone —or recounting her own childhood-—as in Brown Girl Dreaming —Woodson’s remarkably insightful and tactile writing brings her stories to life in a way unlike any other.

Alyssa Cole

Alyssa Cole is the author who got me into romance with her incredible Reluctant Royals series, about a group of friends and the royals they become inexplicably mixed up with. Several of the books and novellas in the series feature queer characters and stories, including Once Ghosted, Twice Shy (a prince’s assistant and a jewelry maker get a second chance)  A Prince on Paper (the underestimated cousin of the new Princess of Thesolo and the bisexual step-prince of Liechtienbourg go from side eye to heart eyes), and  Can’t Escape Love (a nerdy bi businesswoman and puzzle-obsessed designer make a deal and wind up falling for each other in the process).

Akwaeke Emezi

From fabulist literary fiction to young adult fantasy, Akwaeke Emezi has a voice like no other writer today. Their books have haunted and amazed me, and I’m sure they will you, too. Freshwater is the surreal story of a Nigerian woman living with fractured selves and was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award.  Pet explores the realities of a society striving for peace to the point of willfully ignoring the monsters in their midst, all from the perspective of a young trans girl. And their upcoming novel, The Death of Vivek Oji , comes out later this year.

Roxane Gay is a literary icon. Her debut collection, Ayiti , explores the Haitian diaspora through fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her short story collection— Difficult Women —and nonfiction—like Bad Feminist and Hunger —are pretty much mandatory reading at this point. (She says, looking guiltily at their longtime spot on her Goodreads Want-To-Read list. But I’ll get to it! And hopefully you will too.)

Jewelle Gómez

The Gilda Stories has become a modern classic of queer SFF—the story of a lesbian vampire through the ages that earned two Lambda Literary Awards. Her fiction, memoir Forty-Three Septembers , and poetry collections like Oral Tradition: Selected Poems Old and New explore the intersection of her identities as a Black Native American lesbian.

Leah Johnson

Let’s hear it for Black queer girls in YA! Leah Johnson’s debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown , is the story of a who needs to become prom queen to win the scholarship she needs to get out of her small Midwestern town. And keep an eye out for her next book, Rise to the Sun , about queer girls at a music festival.

Samantha Irby

If you want at turns funny, relatable, and heartbreaking essays about what it’s like to be a Black queer woman, look no further than Samantha Irby’s excellent collections about life, love, chronic illness, parenting in suburbia, and surviving adult life in general. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life ,  Wow, No Thank You , and her original essay collection  Meaty are the kind of nonfiction reads that feel like a cathartic conversation with a good friend.

Nalo Hopkinson

A legend of the SFF world, Nalo Hopkinson’s work explores Afro-Caribbean folklore as well as sexuality. Her short story collections, Falling in Love with Hominids and  Skin Folk , feature an array of SFF short stories in her vibrant voice. And in  The Salt Roads Hopkinson creates a collage of strong, independent, and fearless Black women throughout history.

Claire Kann

Clair Kann writes heartwarming and affirming books about Black queer girls. Let’s Talk About Love , her debut novel, is about a bi ace girl working at the library and wondering if it’s possible for her crush to work out after a previous girlfriend dumped her for being asexual. A fat, Black queer girl who is not interested in your diet advice, thank you very much, is at the heart of If It Makes You Happy . And,  The Marvelous , slated for a 2021 release, is about a group of friends, a game night, and a life-altering cash prize.

Julian Winters

If you’re looking for the most relatable, heartfelt queer YA out there, look no further than Julian Winters. From love on the soccer field in Running with Lions to an exploration of labels and self-expression from an out-and-proud gay teen in How To Be Remy Cameron . And his upcoming 2020 novel, The Summer of Everything , is about a boy on the cusp of adulthood trying to save his beloved local bookstore, salvage a strained sibling relationship, and maybe win over his longtime crush while he’s at it.

James Baldwin

You may recognize Baldwin as an influential writer from the Civil Rights era, but he was also deeply passionate and outspoken about discrimination against gay and lesbian people as an openly gay man himself. From the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain to essay collections like The Fire Next Time , Baldwin is an incisive voice in both Black and queer American history. His novels, like Another Country and  Giovanni’s Room , explore love along racial and gender lines and are classics of gay literature.

Sara Collins

Did you say twisted love affair between a Jamaican maid and her French mistress? No? Okay, maybe you just want to read an incredible gothic romance, then? Either way, The Confessions of Frannie Langton is your book! Sara Collins’s 2019 debut was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish prize and winner of the 2019 Costa First Novel Award. With a debut like that, I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

Samuel R. Delany

Another classic author of Black queer SFF. I was first introduced to Samuel R. Delaney in a college lit class. His work can be a little on the esoteric side—so maybe not for anyone looking for a light, breezy read—but it’s a classic of the genre for a reason. Babel-17 explores the power of language against the backdrop of an intergalactic war.  Dhalgren takes place after a strange disaster begins affecting a Midwestern city, with the marginalized left behind to deal with the aftereffects. And Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand explores gender and sexuality in interstellar politics.

Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

Drawing on her experiences in Jamaica and the U.S., Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn pens beautiful, lyrical stories about life on the island nation and the realities of immigration—all centered around queer narratives. Here Comes The Sun tells the story of two sisters confronting old scars as a new hotel threatens their village. And Patsy is an inter-connected narrative of a mother and daughter separated by an ocean, each coming to terms with the reality of their situation and their sexuality.

Nicky Drayden

In Nicky Drayden’s The Prey of Gods , a cast of characters, both queer and not, live with the fallout of a technological advanced society whose ancient connections to the gods has been reawakened. And if that sounds like your jam, then you’ll definitely be a fan of Drayden’s writing in general. Her other books, Escaping Exodus and Temper , are similarly full of queer SFF excellence. (Note that her books deal with some sensitive topics, including sexual assault, so read up on trigger warnings first as needed.)

Bryan Washington

In the mood for literary fiction that isn’t stiff, straight, and oh-so-white? Bryan Washington is your guy. Lot collects Washington’s short stories, depicting Houston life from breakups that affect whole apartment complexes to growing up in the family restaurant and discovering your sexuality. Memorial is a book about family in its strangest forms as Mike leaves behind his longtime partner with his visiting mother in order to visit his dying father in Japan.

For queer YA reads with a hint of fantasy and sci-fi, look no further than The Wicker King and The Weight of the Stars from K. Ancrum. Bi boys discovering their sexuality while completing quests for the Wicker King, part of an elaborate delusion that has them both questioning what’s real? She’s got that. Girls falling in love with girls while dreaming of a life among the stars? Got it. A modern day Peter Pan adaptation set in Chicago? Her upcoming retelling, Darling , has that covered, too.

Want more reading recs? Check out these 3 great queer YA books by black authors ,  books featuring queer black women in love , 6 audiobooks by queer black authors , memoir and essay collections by bi+ women of color , and some excellent LGBTQ South Asian books to read .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Queer Theory

Introduction, feminism and queer theory, bisexual theory, queer utopias and dystopias, trans theory, sex and science, queer cinema studies, anthologies, queer cinema studies, history, queer cinema studies, genres, queer cinema studies, directors, queer politics and communities, queer teens, queering race, related articles expand or collapse the "related articles" section about, about related articles close popup.

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Queer Theory by Maria Pramaggiore LAST REVIEWED: 19 April 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 28 January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0185

Queer Theory emerged from departments of literature, film, rhetoric, and critical studies in universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe during the early 1990s, exemplified and inspired by the publication of two paradigm-shifting books: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( Butler 1990 ) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet ( Sedgwick 2008 ) (both cited under Theory ). Drawing upon the social constructionist views prominent in the work of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, Butler argued that gender is neither a natural nor a stable element of biological or social identity, but rather is constantly brought into existence through a series of performative activities: everyday gestures and actions that have the potential to reconstitute notions and practices of masculinity and femininity and thus resist normativity. Sedgwick similarly attacked foundational models of sexual identity, exploring the closet as more than merely a metaphor and revealing its omnipresence in American culture as a duplicitous social practice (the open secret) and juridical double bind (with a legal system that demands the simultaneous erasure and production of homosexuality). Sedgwick characterized two contradictory and pervasive views of homosexuality, “minoritizing” and “universalizing” discourses. Whereas the former defines homosexuals as a distinct minority, the universalizing view holds that queerness subtends all forms of sexual desire and practice, including heterosexuality. An important antecedent to this flurry of queer scholarly activity was the publication of Foucault’s three-volume work The History of Sexuality , published in English between 1977 and 1984. In it, Foucault rejected the “repressive hypothesis,” which considers sexuality to be a “natural” expression of human identity and treats culture as a repressive force that constrains sexuality. Foucault argued instead that a science of sexuality emerged as one element within the analytic of biopower—a set of 19th-century medical and social technologies that nation-states employed to control their populations. In Foucault’s view, cultural sanctions have not repressed sexual practices but, on the contrary, have produced a modern discourse of sexuality that forces subjects to speak about their sexual practices and desires continually. In addition to Foucault’s work, historical events contributed to the development of Queer Theory. Most important among these was the AIDS epidemic, which decimated queer communities in the United States during the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge the health crisis spurred the formation of activist groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation. These organizations brought media attention to the disease and to the homophobic practices that slowed progress toward treatment and cure. One key feature of the political theatrics of AIDS activism was an unapologetic and assertive stance regarding queer sexualities, as exemplified in the now-famous mantra, “we’re here; we’re queer; get used to it.” That defiant attitude became the defining sensibility of Queer Theory, queer politics, and queer aesthetics. Indeed, the rebellious repurposing of existing cultural artifacts—a strategy long associated with camp—was made explicit in the reclamation of the term “queer.” A combination of pointed anger, sophisticated academic theorizing, and pleasure in perversity informed Queer Theory, art, performance, writing, and the New Queer Cinema that emerged in the early 1990s from this same potent political and intellectual environment.

Queer Theory was, and remains, first and foremost a scholarly enterprise, although its adherents often explore the relationship between theory and practice by acknowledging the power relations inherent in the production of knowledge. Engaging with the works of queer theorists typically requires some knowledge of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the work of Michel Foucault, and possibly a passing familiarity with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, not to mention Jürgen Habermas, among other important modern and postmodern critical thinkers. One central debate within queer theory revolves around the very definition of the term “queer” and focuses upon its theoretical import and potential political usefulness. While political activism energized the notion of queerness as a diverse category comprising sexual dissidents who embrace the subversion of heterosexual normativity (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s minoritizing view), for many theorists, queerness provides an opportunity for deconstructing identity norms altogether (a position more akin to the universalizing view of Sedgwick 2008 ). For Butler 1990 , Butler 1993 , Bersani 2009 , Halperin 1997 , and Halperin and Traub 2009 , for example, “queer” signifies not an identity around which to organize an oppositional politics but a refusal of coherent identities as defined under (neo)liberalism and practiced through identity politics. Queer theorizing, for many, aims at disrupting and politicizing all presumed relations between and among sex, gender, bodies, sexuality, and desire.

Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

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The titular essay in this collection of Bersani’s work is a seminal tract within Queer Theory. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Bersani diagnoses the profound heterosexual anxiety embedded in 1980s representations of gay sex as infection and gay subjects as killers. He seeks to redefine sex as a practice that shatters the experience of the self rather than reinforcing it.

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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York: Routledge, 1990.

One of the most important early works of Queer Theory, Butler’s book proposes that gender is something that people do, not something that they are. From this standpoint, gender can productively be detached from the biological distinction between the sexes. Furthermore, enacting gender is a performative process: invoking gender through acts, behavior, and style produces gender discursively.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex . New York: Routledge, 1993.

Butler extends her discussion of gender performativity by challenging the notion that the body (and, specifically, anatomical sex) functions as a material limit constraining performances of gender and race. Instead, she contends, the body is discursively produced as well.

Fuss, Diana, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories . New York: Routledge, 1991.

Seminal collection of essays demonstrating queer theoretical approaches to popular culture, literature, film, and history. Many of the essays became Queer Theory classics, including those by D. A. Miller, Patricia White, and Richard Meyer.

Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography . New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

This controversial book seeks to secure Foucault’s central place in queer politics. Halperin explores the reasons why gay activists have been inspired by Foucault’s intellectual work and personal history. Some Foucault scholars denounce the work, arguing that Foucault would have rejected the use of his ideas for political organizing.

Halperin, David, and Valerie Traub, eds. Gay Shame . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Turning gay pride on its end, this essay collection, which originated with a conference at the University of Michigan, seeks to reclaim emotion, embarrassment, and dissidence as central elements of queer practice.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

In this seminal work of queer studies, Sedgwick analyzes and deconstructs the heterosexual/homosexual binary, exposing its contradictions through examinations of legal discourse and literature. Emphasizing the performative nature of speech acts—that is, the way language brings ideologies and practices into being—the author argues that hetero- and homosexualities are mutually constructed entities that subtend a homophobic culture. Originally published in 1990.

Despite a common intellectual and political project related to the interrogation of gender, sex, and sexualities, feminist theory and queer theory are often at odds, particularly in terms of their differing views on gender difference. Weed and Schor 1997 offers a comprehensive look at the points of commonality, but also notes that feminism’s interest in exposing and resisting, and in some cases upholding, notions and practices of gender difference is often seen as a problematic reification of those differences by queer theorists. Similarly Straayer 1996 reappraises feminist film theory by analyzing the production of queer bodies in film and video that defy the biological and psychoanalytical assumptions of feminism.

Straayer, Chris. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientation in Film and Video . New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Straayer brings Queer Theory to feminist film theory to argue that a variety of deviant practices of spectatorship flourish outside the limits of binary concepts of gender and sexuality.

Weed, Elizabeth, and Naomi Schor, eds. Feminism Meets Queer Theory . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

This essay collection includes work by scholars such as Judith Butler, Biddy Martin, Carole-Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Grosz, all investigating the intersections as well as divergences in feminist, lesbian, and queer theories.

Theorizing bisexuality often begins with the assertion that bisexuality has been neglected within the field of queer studies because gay, lesbian, and queer theorists refuse to acknowledge its very existence. Writers on bisexuality often argue that the political and personal implications of bisexuality threaten the sexual status quo of monosexuality (which encompasses both heterosexuality and homosexuality) and that bisexuality undermines the significance of object choice for sexual identity, desire, and practice. Hall and Pramaggiore 1996 claims that bisexuality is in itself plural, associated with desires, acts, performances, and modes of reading cultural texts, rather than presenting a coherent subject for identity politics. Hemmings 2002 takes up this subject as well, focusing on the metaphor of spatialization to move beyond binary models. Merl Storr’s important anthology ( Storr 1999 ) excerpts and organizes key theoretical writings on bisexuality in the past century.

Hall, Donald E., and Maria Pramaggiore, eds. Representing Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire . New York: New York University Press, 1996.

This early collection of essays theorizes bisexuality beyond its familiar status as an erased and denied social identity within queer communities and argues for the intellectual and political productivity of multiple and unstable readings and practices of bisexualities.

Hemmings, Clare. Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender . New York: Routledge, 2002.

Hemmings addresses the confluence of feminist theory, queer theory, and post-structuralism and its impact on theorizing bisexuality. She identifies competing strands of thinking, one that views bisexuality as an identity and another that considers bisexuality a challenge to sexual identity.

Storr, Merl, ed. Bisexuality: A Critical Reader . New York: Routledge, 1999.

The collection brings together primary sources on bisexuality from the 19th through the 20th century, revealing a vast array of definitions and deployments of bisexuality.

The relationships between queernesses—which for Edelman 2004 are based in nonreproductive sexuality—and futurity has become a provocative question within theory and politics in the last several decades. What is at stake when Edelman proposes a queer ethics not based on future generations? Whereas Edelman sees the future orientation of queerness as negativity, Muñoz 2009 links queer performance to utopian futures and Freeman 2010 broadly examines the productive possibilities of a nonlinear queer temporality.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

This provocative work forwards the notion that queer ethics should embrace, not temper, its threatening “negativity,” which is based in a lack of participation in reproduction. A queer refusal to invest in heterosexual “reproductive futurism” would revolutionize a politics based on sentimental claims that we should work to improve the future for our children.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Analyzing literature, photography, and performance, Freeman analyzes the pleasures associated with queer time as an alternative to the “heterosexually gendered double time of stasis and progress, intimacy and generation” (p. 23). Queer artists whose work changes tempos and foreground the affective and immediacy of sex, Freeman argues, can lead to the unbinding of time.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity . New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Celebrating the work of contemporary queer performers and artists, Munoz rejects assimilation-driven politics (e.g., the gay marriage movement) and presents the challenge and promise of the future as the construction of queer utopia.

Many queer historians designate the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York as the event that gave rise to the modern gay rights liberation movement and generated many of the ideas that would emerge in the Queer Theory of the 1990s. While acknowledging the importance of Stonewall for political organizing, other queer historians and historiographers question whether emphasizing this dramatic moment of visibility in queer history too often obfuscates complex questions of how queer subjects negotiated their identities and communities in earlier eras. A number of historians, beginning with John D’Emilio and his critical early work on the postwar United States ( D’Emilio 1998 ), seek to explore queer subjectivities in “other” places and times, recognizing that different historical eras and cultural locations produce sexual and social identities that are not necessarily amenable to contemporary concepts and terminology (gay, lesbian, queer, transsexual, transgender, bisexual). Several historians establish broad linkages to sexuality in ancient cultures, including Halperin 1989 and Laqueur 1990 , whereas the modern urban environment is positioned as the source of organizing for 20th-century gay communities in Chauncey 1995 , on New York City, and Faderman and Timmons 2006 , on Los Angeles. Although it is becoming increasingly difficult to narrate a single queer history, given the diversity of experiences across nations, regions, and eras—made evident by Susan Stryker’s path-breaking work on transgender history ( Stryker 2008 )— Black 2001 surveys major political issues related to queer identities, whereas Gross 2002 focuses explicitly on queerness and media representation.

Black, Allida M. Modern American Queer History . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Wide-ranging essay collection that encompasses a variety of subjects and eras, including the romantic friendship of the 19th century, the Harlem Renaissance, civil rights, immigration, and gays in the military.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 . New York: Basic Books, 1995.

This important historical study balances the emphasis on Stonewall and post–World War II gay life with a look at thriving gay communities in New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Considered by most queer historians to offer the definitive history of homophile movements in the United States since World War II, D’Emilio’s book pays particular attention to two organizations, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis.

Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons, eds. Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians . New York: Basic, 2006.

Reaching as far back as the 16th century to establish a cultural history of Los Angeles, Faderman and Timmons discuss the European conquest and the Spanish suppression of Native American culture and its traditions of sexual fluidity as well as the 20th-century influence of Hollywood and its stars on the discourses and practices of gay and lesbian identities in this major American metropolis.

Gross, Larry. Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America . New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Gross provides a historical overview of gay and lesbian media representation in the latter half of the 20th century, from newspapers to television and film.

Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love . New York: Routledge, 1989.

In arguing that classical Greek erotic practices cannot be assessed using contemporary models of sexuality, Halperin laid the groundwork for queer historiography with this work, which takes issue with classical historians and their politically biased treatment of homosexuality in ancient Greece.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

By proposing the historical and cultural malleability of models of human sexuality—documenting the Greek one-sex ideal (wherein females were imperfect males), which gave way to the two-sex model of the 18th century—Laqueur makes tangible the Foucauldian notion that sex and gender are constructed discursively.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History . Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2008.

In this introduction to the history of transgender politics in the United States from World War II to the present, Stryker includes a glossary of transgender terms and concepts as well as a discussion of the complex relationship among transgender political movements and feminist and gay and lesbian theory and activism.

The advent of gay and lesbian studies and Queer Theory courses and programs in some universities has been accompanied by the publication of broad introductory works aimed at establishing and clarifying the terminology, theoretical presuppositions, and historical context for Queer Theory. These include Annamarie Jagose’s practical and accessible introduction to the basic concepts and debates in the field ( Jagose 1997 ), along with Giffney and O’Rourke 2009 , a compilation of essays that traces the evolution of scholarly debates. Whereas several texts privilege the historical emergence of academic queer theory, including Turner 2000 and Wilchins 2004 , others emphasize the critical relationship between academic theory and queer politics, including Sullivan 2003 and Morland and Willox 2005 .

Giffney, Noreen, and Michael O’Rourke. The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory . Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

This collection of thirty essays spans four major areas within Queer Theory: identity, discourse, normativity, and relationality.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction . New York: New York University Press, 1997.

This comprehensive overview pays particular attention to the historical roots of queer theorizing and scholarship and focuses on debates regarding the political efficacy of a program that aims to deconstruct the coherent self.

Morland, Iain, and Annabelle Willox, eds. Queer Theory . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Collection of fifteen essays that attempts to tease out, without resolving, the problematic relationship between theory and politics.

Sullivan, Nikki. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory . New York: New York University Press, 2003.

A broad introduction to the field, with chapters that address the debate between political assimilation versus liberation, sadomasochism as resistance, queerness and race, and transsexual/transgender issues.

Turner, William Benjamin. A Genealogy of Queer Theory . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Turner historicizes the development of Queer Theory, tracing key concepts to the work of Foucault and Habermas, feminist and lesbian theorists, and psychoanalysis.

Wilchins, Riki. Queer Theory/Gender Theory: An Instant Primer . Los Angeles: Alyson, 2004.

Wilchins draws on discussions of Queer Theory along with civil rights histories to make theory accessible to queer activists without diluting its intellectual heft or academic history.

With the burgeoning of a queer political movement that embraced a wide variety of non-normative sexual identities and practices came a growing recognition that transgender and transsexual individuals could provide unique perspectives on the fraught relation between gender and sexuality. Garber 1997 examines the long-standing cross-cultural practice of cross-dressing through the lens of gender rather than sexuality. Like much queer theorizing, Trans Theory has been written by individuals whose transgender and/or transsexual experiences inform their lives, their politics, and their work, including Bornstein 1995 , Feinberg 1999 , Halberstam 2005 , and Halberstam 2006 . Salamon 2010 builds on the work of these writers and on Butler 1993 (cited under Theory ) to theorize the way that trans identities, which presuppose the detachment of biological sex and gender, offer new perspectives on the cultural experience of the body’s materiality. In Nestle, et al. 2002 and in Stryker and Whittle 2006 , personal testimonies lay the groundwork for theorizing about the significance of trans culture and the seemingly insurmountable cultural attachment to gender normativity.

Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us . New York: Vintage, 1995.

Bornstein was born a man and completed gender reassignment surgery to become a lesbian. Drawing upon research as well as personal experience, Bornstein argues not only for a more complex understanding of gender that is divorced from anatomical sex, but also for the importance of recognizing that multiple genders exist alongside of and in between the two culturally sanctioned genders.

Feinberg, Leslie. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue . Boston: Beacon, 1999.

This collection of writer/activist Feinberg’s speeches, supplemented by short pieces from other trans writers, connects the fear and hatred surrounding trans identities to racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other systems of social oppression.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety . New York: Routledge, 1997.

This wide-ranging study examines practices of cross-dressing from medieval Britain to the contemporary United States, noting that cross-dressing is invariably related to specific historical anxieties about women’s power and economic status.

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives . New York: New York University Press, 2005.

This comprehensive analysis of the representation of the transgender body in popular culture and film includes a thorough discussion of the documentary and feature films that depict the life of Brandon Teena.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Detaching masculinity from the male body, Halberstam examines the relationship between masculinity and power by exploring the lives and performances of butch women, lesbians, and drag kings. Originally published in 1998.

Nestle, Joan, Riki Wilchins, and Clare Howell. GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary . Los Angeles: Alyson, 2002.

This collection offers first-person essays and narratives that give voice to the great variety of gender positions and practices, including pieces by and on femmes, queens, a woman poppa, drag kings, and translesbians.

Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality . New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

This work draws upon phenomenology and psychoanalysis to consider the ways that materiality, or the “felt sense” of the body, is culturally produced and argues that transsexual and transgender bodies offer a way of understanding the way the relation between the material body and the imagined body can be lived out.

Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. The Transgender Studies Reader . New York: Routledge, 2006.

A collection of fifty essays by transgender individuals as well as academics, physicians, and psychologists, covering transgender experiences, histories, and practices from the 19th century to the present.

One of the most important scientific discussions to emerge from queer theorizing centers on the question of the genetic origins of homosexuality. As with many subjects within queer studies, Foucault’s analytics of biopower and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s were catalyst for theorists, who began to analyze the sexual politics that imbue myriad social and intellectual enterprises, including the culture of science. Patton 1990 looks at the politicization of science in the context of the public health crisis that AIDS produced. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay ( LeVay 1997 ) more pointedly takes on the culture of scientific research, arguing that the study of the biological causes of homosexuality is by definition a political, and potentially homophobic, project. Fausto-Sterling 2000 specifically attributes scientific bias to the gender ideologies of scientists, whereas Lancaster 2003 points to the inherent homophobia of scientific claims, which, Lancaster proposes, are a specific response to recent political gains. Ordover 2003 links the science on queerness to the pseudoscience of eugenics in the United States, arguing that early- and late-20th-century social and scientific practices designed to regulate “unfit” members of a society, whether immigrants, racial minorities, or queers, have a common political lineage. While some members of gay, lesbian, and queer communities applauded the fact that science might confirm that queer individuals were “born that way” (in the words of the 2011 Lady Gaga song), others lament the search for the “gay gene” as intrinsically homophobic and potentially dangerous for queer individuals and communities.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality . New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Groundbreaking work on the biases within science that produce rigid definitions of sex and gender when, in fact, ambiguity abounds. According to Fausto-Sterling, anxieties about gender confusion inform the work of research scientists. In her view, culture and biology together construct gender and sexual identity.

Lancaster, Roger. The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Through an exploration of science writing in the American media, Lancaster argues that the recent surge of biological explanations for sexuality and sexual behavior (including evolutionary biology) are rooted in homophobic politics, part of a backlash against the advances made in gay and lesbian politics.

LeVay, Simon. Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

LeVay, a neuroscientist who conducted much-publicized research on the difference between the brains of straight and gay men, surveys a century of scientific research that attempts to discern a biological explanation for homosexuality. The book makes clear the politicization of scientific hypothesis and conclusions.

Ordover, Nancy. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Ordover examines the relationship between science and politics in this work on the “science of nationalism,” a body of pseudoscience based upon biological theories of race, gender, and sexuality. The author links campaigns of discrimination and genocide against immigrants to those against women, people of color, and queer bodies in the United States in the 20th century.

Patton, Cindy. Inventing AIDS . New York: Routledge, 1990.

Powerful personal and political essay collection on the politicization of science and public health policy during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. A central point Patton makes is that when medical science is imbued with homophobia and ignorance, health policy is inadequate at best and harmful at worst, and human beings suffer.

Queer cinema studies blends the theoretical interests of queer theory with the analytical methods and concepts of film studies, producing work that ranges from focused aesthetic examinations of individual texts to historical accounts of cinema as a cross-cultural and political theater of desire. Queer cinema studies predates the development of New Queer Cinema (NQC), which incubated within the crucible of academic theorizing and political activism of the 1980s, but it developed rapidly during that era, as filmmakers and films brought new questions to the debates on queer visibility. Prominent NQC directors Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, and Greg Araki, for example, studied post-structuralism and Queer Theory and incorporated anti-essentialist (social constructionist) concepts of gender and sexuality into their films. Reflecting the importance of the connection between theory and practice in queer cinema, Gever, et al. 1993 exclusively features the work of practicing filmmakers and visual artists. Creekmur and Doty 1995 and Hanson 1999 were two of the first works to merge queer studies and film studies by collecting criticism and commentary from writers working across academic and artistic contexts; the former takes a broader view of the forms of popular culture that have proven ripe for appreciation and appropriation in queer communities. In 2004, two collections on American cinema simultaneously called attention to the importance of the contemporary New Queer film scene ( Aaron 2004 ) and referenced the longer history of thinking and writing about queerness in cinema ( Benshoff and Griffin 2004 ).

Aaron, Michelle. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader . New York: Rutgers, 2004.

Collection of essays on the Queer Cinema of the 1990s, including B. Ruby Rich’s 1992 Sight & Sound article, “New Queer Cinema,” which articulated the movement in broad terms as one that married queer sexual content to experimental style.

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin, eds. Queer Cinema: The Film Reader . New York: Routledge, 2004.

Essays on queer cinema, new and old, organized by four subject areas: authorship, film form, camp, and reception theory.

Creekmur, Corey K., and Alexander Doty, eds. Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

Featuring writings from many seminal queer theorists, including Al LaValley, Robin Wood, Richard Dyer, and Danae Clark, this wide-ranging essay collection treats subjects from Hitchcock to pornography and from disco to drag as sites of queer cultural production and resistance.

Gever, Martha, Pratibha Pramar, and John Greyson, eds. Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video . New York: Routledge, 1993.

Essays by queer film video artists, visual artists, and critics on the global explosion in queer image culture.

Hanson, Ellis, ed. Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

This essay collection combines work by scholars and filmmakers, with particular emphasis on queer spectatorship and queer filmmaking.

Whereas the academic field of queer cinema studies was inaugurated by the publication of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet ( Russo 1987 , 1st ed. 1981) and Richard Dyer’s Now You See It: Historical Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film ( Dyer 1990 ), representations of queerness in cinema date back to the earliest years of the medium, with films such as Anders als die Andern  / Different from the Others (1919), and have flourished within underground practices in the United States with mid-20th-century avant-garde works such as Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), and Barbara Hammer’s A Gay Day (1973) and Dyketactics (1974). Scholars working in queer cinema have adopted a host of methodological approaches and generated numerous internal debates since the early 1990s; some focus on explicitly gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and/or queer (film) texts and directors, while others, including Dyer 1990 , Doty 1993 , and Doty 2000 , employ queer reading practices to decode the closeted rhetoric of classical Hollywood, popular television, and censored cinemas. Benshoff and Griffin 2005 traces the social and aesthetic histories of cinematic representations of sexual alterity, and Griffiths 2006 focuses on British national identity and the evocation of queerness in relation to history and genre. White 1999 reconsiders the classical Hollywood cinema not as a mode of suppression but rather as a precursor to contemporary lesbian cinema and a source for numerous continuing tropes of lesbian representability.

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Intended as an update of, and somewhat more complicated rejoinder to, Russo’s The Celluloid Closet ( Russo 1987 ), this history of queer images in American cinema contextualizes screen queerness in relation to social, legal, and historical events in Hollywood and the United States.

Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Doty argues not for the essential queerness of texts but for the queerness of particular reading positions and strategies. Through readings of popular film and television programs, he demonstrates how viewers deftly extract queer value from moments of textual dissidence or elision.

Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon . New York: Routledge, 2000.

Taking six ostensibly mainstream films, including Psycho (1962), The Women (1939), and The Red Shoes (1948), Doty performs queer deconstructive readings, demonstrating the ways that queerness can be produced by the interaction of text and reader.

Dyer, Richard. Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film . New York: Routledge, 1990.

The first edition of this book was a groundbreaking reference for scholars of queer cinema history. Dyer looks back at representations of gay men and lesbians in international cinema throughout the 20th century, from Mädchen in Uniform (1931) to Anders Als die Andern (1919) to Flaming Creatures (1963). The second edition, released in 2003, includes material on film culture since 1990.

Griffiths, Robin, ed. British Queer Cinema . New York: Routledge, 2006.

Collection of essays on “Queer Britannia,” a third of which consider early- to mid-20th-century films. Distinctive British genre films, from the kitchen-sink drama to the Heritage film, are addressed in several essays.

Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies . 2d ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

Originally published in 1981, gay activist Vito Russo’s book instantly became the definitive study of gay cinema. The book identifies homophobic stereotypes of the sissy and the predatory dyke that prevailed in representations of homosexual characters from the 1920s through the 1970s. The last chapter discusses the advent of independent cinema in the 1980s—the precursor to New Queer Cinema.

White, Patricia. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

White argues for the importance of studio-era Hollywood cinema for establishing codes and constructing signifiers of lesbianism that persist into the contemporary era. The specific features of the Motion Picture Production Code’s prohibition of overt representations of “deviant” sexualities, White contends, encoded lesbian desire in specific ways; thus censorship practices themselves produced images of lesbians for female audiences, particularly through the genre of the woman’s film.

Two genres frequently are associated with queer representation: the horror cinema, where the monster’s ambiguity, otherness, and resistance align it with figures of queerness, and the musical, long associated with gay male involvement in production and consumption. Halberstam 1995 and Benshoff 1997 explore the horror genre in terms of form, style, and history, concluding that the subject matter of monstrosity bears critical connections to the social and psychological dynamics of queer otherness. Weiss 1993 traces the long cinematic history of the sexualized vamp and her importance to lesbian spectators. Cohan 2005 argues for the centrality of camp to the musical in its heyday and in more contemporary eras, whereas Wolf 2002 directs the discussion of the musical away from gay representation and argues for the importance of the genre to lesbians as well.

Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film . Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Citing hundreds of examples from Hollywood horror films, Benshoff argues that there is a peculiar connection between queerness and horror (a genre that addresses deep-seated cultural fears). He historicizes this relationship by marking changes over time in cultural attitudes toward monsters and queers.

Cohan, Steven. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Cohan focuses on the MGM musical during its heyday in the 1940s as a vehicle for mass entertainment. He argues that, paradoxically, the camp elements at work in these films established the broad popular appeal of the genre and its stars in that era. Increasingly, the public has recognized and embraced the camp value of these films as historical and nostalgic artifacts.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

Examining the gothic genre as a technology for purveying images and dynamics of otherness and difference, Halberstam looks at literature and films that speak to their specific moment in time as well as to deep-seated cultural fears.

Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film . New York: Penguin, 1993.

One of the first books to thoroughly investigate a century of lesbian film images, from early cinema’s vamps and schoolgirls to Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Weiss identifies the predominantly negative attributes ascribed to screen lesbians and makes the important observation that lesbian viewers have long identified with this iconography.

Wolf, Stacy Ellen. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Arguing against the commonplace assumptions that musical theater and films are the exclusive purview of gay men and that they are essentially conservative, Wolf presents the case that the funny women and tomboys of the musical genre offer performances that evoke queer-tinged resistance to gender and sexual norms.

The queerness of a film is not dependent upon the sexual identity of its director—a fact that allows for the scholarly examination of a broad range of films that implicitly or explicitly convey queer content, or that embed silences and aporias that invite queer reading strategies. Auteurism meets sexual ambiguity in Gutiérrez-Albilla 2008 on Luis Buñuel, whereas Morrison 2007 on Todd Haynes and Richardson 2008 on Derek Jarman explicitly situate their directors within the historical moment of New Queer Cinema. Crimp 2012 examines the somewhat neglected catalog of Andy Warhol’s films and argues that Warhol’s filmmaking practice remains as important as the product of these Factory-made films.

Crimp, Douglas. “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Despite his ubiquity in art history and cultural studies, Warhol remains a somewhat neglected figure in film studies, considering the fact that he made more than one hundred films. Crimp explores six films as examples of a new kind of cinema that Warhol pioneered, involving not only new ways of seeing but also new social relationships.

Gutiérrez-Albilla, Julián. Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema . London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008.

Not content to leave Buñuel solely in the hands of those who merely label him a surrealist, Gutiérrez-Albilla argues that queer characters and subtexts and polymorphous sexualities animate the director’s Spanish and Mexican films.

Morrison, James, ed. The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows . London and New York: Wallflower, 2007.

This collection considers Todd Haynes not only as a New Queer Cinema filmmaker but also as a cine-theorist; an intellectual and artist whose work has been influenced by post-structuralist theory, avant-garde cinema, and the films of Rainer Fassbinder; and a director whose work has, in turn, influenced queer and mainstream filmmaking alike.

Richardson, Niall. The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman: Critical and Cultural Readings . London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008.

One of the most important filmmakers of New Queer Cinema, Jarman is also recognized for his bold and experimental work with film form. Richardson focuses on the way Jarman poses questions of sexual radicalism and alterity through formal and aesthetic elements rather than by adhering to a specific political agenda.

Although Queer Theory evolved within the academy, many queer scholars remain committed to exploring the real-world implications of their theorizing for queer individuals and communities. Debates regarding the efficacy of traditional identity/interest politics, as well as the advisability of goals such as legalizing gay marriage, have been informed by Berlant 1997 , which critiques the redefinition of the public sphere in American politics, and Dean 2009 , which explores the dynamics of subversion, belonging, and politicized sex within subcultural queer communities. Seidman 1997 , Warner 1993 , and Warner 1999 advocate the queering of political discourse and engagement, rather than simply imagining that queer individuals could be “added” as a minority group to the pluralism of American politics. Walters 2003 offers a cautionary view of the recent visibility of queer identities, suggesting that this is not equivalent to political efficacy, and Puar 2007 situates the mainstreaming of queer politics in the US “homeland” in relation to Islamophobia after September 11.

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Berlant’s influential book makes the case that the public sphere has been diminished beyond recognition and has been eclipsed by a notion of citizenship that defines civic behavior through private, and particularly sexual, behavior.

Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

A careful look at a controversial practice and community of practitioners: gay men who choose not to practice safe sex. Dean examines a subculture whose embrace of pleasure and subversion, in his view, contributes to the creation of new kinship structures.

Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Homonationalism refers to the growing acceptance of homosexual subjects within the American political community, particularly as married and reproductive subjects. This embrace of hetero and homo patriots, Puar argues, has occurred at the same time that Arabs, Sikhs, and Muslims have been subjected to Islamophobia and defined as perverse terrorists.

Seidman, Steven. Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511557910 Save Citation » Export Citation » Share Citation »

Seidman queers social theory in a deconstructive sense by placing into doubt foundational assumptions regarding which differences matter in social and political theory and by foregrounding the importance of sexual politics within those milieus.

Walters, Suzanne Danuta. All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Using popular culture texts to address the seeming ubiquity of gay people and identities, from Ellen DeGeneres to Matthew Shepard, Walters argues that queer visibility should not be equated with political progress and that a number of contradictions attend the appearance of the social acceptance that accompanies visibility.

Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Early, important compendium of essays by scholars on the forefront of queer theory, including Lauren Berlant, Douglas Crimp, Jonathan Goldberg, Diana Fuss, and Cindy Patton.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Warner argues that sexual shame has animated the movement to legalize same-sex marriage: advocates of gay marriage within gay and lesbian communities, he contends, participate in “sexual McCarthyism” and reject sexuality to win mainstream approval, explicitly rejecting sexual nonconformity and queer difference.

As Queer Theory brought renewed attention to the nature versus nurture debate, the question of queer kids arose, partly due to the conservative scrutiny of some popular culture figures as insidious queer recruitment devices ( Pee-wee’s Playhouse , SpongeBob SquarePants , Teletubbies ) and partly due to the increasing awareness of bullying of gay children and high rates of suicide and depression among queer youth (which instigated the viral “It Gets Better” Internet campaign in 2010 and garnered widespread attention for the 2012 documentary film Bully ). Adams 1997 , on Canadian popular culture, traces the public and popular culture discourse of heterosexual normalization, whereas Dennis 2006 argues that a contradictory suppression and exploration of queer desire can be found in film and television. Pascoe 2007 brings to life the everyday gestures, language, and social practices that define adolescent masculinity.

Adams, Mary Louise. The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Examines the way books, television, sex education materials, and popular comic books aimed at teenagers in postwar Canada equated heterosexuality with normalcy.

Dennis, Jeffrey P. Queering Teen Culture: All-American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film and Television . New York: Haworth, 2006.

This book examines an apparent contradiction: the intensity of representations of heterosexual desire by teenage boys in American films between 1955 and 1995 and the films’ simultaneous critique of heteronormativity.

Pascoe, C. J. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

In this ethnographic study of daily life in high school, Pascoe identifies the rituals and rhetorics that govern the gender definition of high-school-age American boys.

Susan Sontag defined camp for an audience of American intellectuals in “Notes on Camp” ( Sontag 1964 ); since then, debates have raged regarding camp and the performativity of gender. Esther Newton explored the world of female impersonators in an early book, Newton 1979 . Most writers on camp, notably Meyer 1994 and Cleto 1999 , seek to resist and also to complicate Sontag’s assertion that camp is fundamentally aesthetic, and therefore apolitical. Contributors to these two collections explore whether camp represents an attitude or a practice, whether it is exclusively or primarily homosexual or queer, whether lesbians camp, and whether and how camp offers critique or lays the groundwork for political activism. A great deal of scholarly writing has taken up this question in theoretical terms as well as in relation to specific practices and texts. Tinkcom 2002 pushes the discussion beyond gender to address camp as labor, arguing that camp undermines the commodity form and the capitalist mode of production.

Cleto, Fabio, ed. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Comprehensive collection of important historical and contemporary writings on camp; an essential resource for scholars engaged with camp as a historical, aesthetic, and political practice.

Meyer, Moe, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp . London: Routledge, 1994.

Collection of essays that redefines camp as a mode of oppositional critique intrinsic to queerness, which itself poses an ontological challenge (emerging from the social constructionist view of subject formation) to a “depth model of identity” (p. 2) that governs identity categories of class, sex, and gender.

Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

An ethnographic approach to the world of drag queens, published more than a decade before the release of Jennie Livingston’s documentary film on the same subject, Paris is Burning (1990). Newton interviews drag queens, interrogating the meanings of drag, camp, and the work of performance.

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Partisan Review 31 (1964): 515–530.

In this essay, Sontag identifies the important cultural work performed by homosexuals regarding matters of aesthetics and taste, yet relegates the irony and satire of camp—its attempt to “dethrone” the serious—to the apolitical realm, an assertion that would be taken up by queer theorists and debated for decades.

Tinkcom, Matthew. Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Tinkcom studies Vincente Minnelli, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and John Waters to reconsider camp not merely as an expression of sexual dissidence but also as an aesthetic and intellectual practice that rejects and redefines capitalist notions of commodity, labor, and value.

A number of scholars argue that queerness is informed and inflected by racial as well as gender identities and sexual performativity, and they have produced work that examines Queer Theory’s blind eye toward the racial dimensions of the identities it examines. Barnard 2004 exposes the lack of attention paid to matters of race in queer studies and also investigates critical race studies work that neglects sexuality. Johnson and Henderson 2005 investigates some of the central metaphors and practices of queer studies—for example, drag—by situating them in relation to practices of race and racial othering. Dunning 2009 returns to the powerful nexus of race and otherness represented by the figure of the interracial couple in American culture, reframing the interracial in the context of same-sex desire. Hoad 2007 attends to the global dimension of queer identities by connecting race and homosexuality to African identities in literature. Muñoz 1999 argues that queers of color perform their politics by refusing the identifications offered by mainstream culture.

Barnard, Ian. Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory . New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Using theory, porn, popular culture, and literature, Barnard argues that we need to pay greater attention to the racial politics embedded in queer theory and become aware of the presumptions of sexual normativity that generally attend academic analyses of race.

Dunning, Stefanie K. Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

This book examines the trope of the queer interracial relationship, arguing that the depiction of racial difference functions as mode of foregrounding black authenticity.

Hoad, Neville. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Hoad points to the need for a global purview for Queer Theory in this examination of homosexuality in African culture and literature under the conditions of globalization.

Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

This collection of sixteen essays explores intersections of racial and sexual identity, examining the racial dimensions of the closet metaphor, brave lesbians and black lesbian visibility, the whiteness of gay ghettos, and racial drag.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Queer artists of color have adopted a number of strategies of “disidentification”—including camp, drag, and satire—to mark their distance from mainstream culture in order to pose a political critique through aesthetic means.

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• About Cinema and Media Studies »
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• 2001: A Space Odyssey
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Louis Gossett Jr., Oscar-winning actor from 'An Officer and a Gentleman' and 'Roots,' dies at 87

Louis Gossett Jr., who became the first Black man to win the Oscar for best supporting actor for playing a no-nonsense drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman” (1982), has died, his family said Friday.

"It is with our heartfelt regret to confirm our beloved father passed away this morning," the actor's family said in a statement. "We would like to thank everyone for their condolences at this time. Please respect the family’s privacy during this difficult time."

In an acting career that spanned six decades, Gossett appeared in dozens of movies and television shows, including the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961) and big-screen spectacles like “The Deep” (1977).

He won an Emmy for playing the old slave Fiddler in the seminal ABC miniseries “Roots” (1977), acting in three of the program’s eight episodes. He delivered a memorable late-career turn in HBO’s “Watchmen” (2019), playing a former vigilante known as Hooded Justice. But his portrayal of the tough-as-nails Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” a romantic drama co-starring Richard Gere and Debra Winger, cemented him deepest in the public consciousness.

“There’s a love-hate relationship between the sergeant and his trainees,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review . “Lou Gossett Jr. does such a fine job of fine-tuning the line between his professional standards and his personal emotions that the performance deserves its Academy Award.”

Gossett’s triumph at the 55th Academy Awards in 1983 made him only the second Black man to win an acting Oscar, 19 years after Sidney Poitier won for his leading role in “Lilies of the Field.”

Louis Gossett Jr. was born May 27, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York. He was drawn to athletics as a kid, especially basketball, but an injury kept him from playing for a time and led him to another pursuit: stage acting.When he was in high school, a teacher encouraged him to try out for a play — and that audition resulted in his Broadway debut in the 1953 production of “Take a Giant Step,” a coming-of-age tale about a Black teenager growing up in a predominantly white community.

He graduated from high school a year later and then enrolled at New York University. He continued to pick up acting gigs along the way, including a role in the Broadway version of “The Desk Set,” as well as small parts on television shows.

Gossett’s most notable stage credit was in the original cast of “A Raisin in the Sun,” a classic play about a Black family searching for a better life. Gossett portrayed the wealthy and pretentious George Murchison, a role he reprised in the 1961 movie version directed by Daniel Petrie.

He continued to act in Broadway and off-Broadway productions during the 1960s. He made his second major film appearance in Hal Ashby’s dark comedy “The Landlord,” released in 1970. The same year, he co-starred on the short-lived TV series “The Young Rebels.”

Gossett landed roles in several lesser-known movies during the early ‘70s, including “Skin Game” (1971), George Cukor’s “Travels With My Aunt” (1972) and “The Laughing Policeman” (1973). He played a drug kingpin in “The Deep,” adapted from a novel by “Jaws” author Peter Benchley.

“Roots,” a sweeping chronicle of the evils of slavery, raised Gossett’s profile, landing him an Emmy in September 1977. Gossett’s fellow nominees in his category were all members of the “Roots” ensemble: John Amos, LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen. (The series itself claimed six awards, including best limited series.)

Gossett reprised the role of Fiddler in the 1988 television movie “Roots: The Gift.”

“An Officer and a Gentleman” propelled Gossett to national acclaim. He underwent rigorous training for the role, spending 10 days at a school for drill instructors at Camp Pendleton in California, where he marched, ran and practiced karate from 4:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day.He was thrilled to receive an Oscar nomination, but he was convinced the supporting actor prize would go to industry veterans Robert Preston (“Victor/Victoria”) or James Mason (“The Verdict”). 

When presenters Christopher Reeve and Susan Sarandon called his name from the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Gossett’s agent jabbed him in the chest, the actor recalled in 2018. “They said your name,” the agent said.

“I got up as smooth as I possibly could, trying to figure out what I was going to say,” Gossett recalled in an interview with the Television Academy.

Gossett was disappointed that bigger film parts did not follow his Oscar victory.“I was left with a lot of time on my hands” after the Academy Award, Gossett told The New York Times in 1989 . “I thought I’d get a lot of offers — and they didn’t come.”

“I let myself become bitter, resentful,” he added. “I was my own worst enemy. I said to myself, ‘What more can I do? Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel?’ I started to self-destruct.”

He started to abuse alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. “I had an Oscar, an Emmy, and yet I had this big hole in my soul,” Gossett told the Times.

Eventually, Gossett entered a residential drug-treatment program in Los Angeles and stopped using drugs, according to the profile in the Times. The path to sobriety was “very humbling and necessary, a very positive time,” he said.

Gossett was a ubiquitous and dependable presence on the big and small screens for decades to come — quietly commanding, sometimes intimidating, sometimes soulful.

He acted in genre-spanning films such as “Jaws 3-D” (1983), “Enemy Mine” (1985), “The Principal” (1987), “The Punisher” (1989), “Toy Soldiers” (1991), “Diggstown” (1992), “Blue Chips” (1994) and a string of under-the-radar indie movies from 2000-2010.

He frequently cropped up on television, guest-starring on episodes of “Touched by an Angel,” “ER,” “Psych,” “Boardwalk Empire.” He recently played a small but pivotal role as a legendary attorney accused of sexual misconduct on the Paramount+ series “The Good Fight.”

“Watchmen,” Damon Lindelof’s celebrated limited series based on the landmark DC Comics series of the same name, gave Gossett one of his most distinctive late-period roles. He was the enigmatic Will Reeves, grandfather of the show’s hero, Angela Abar, played by Regina King.

Gossett's final run of roles included Ol' Mister Johnson in the 2023 film musical version of "The Color Purple" and a voice part in the John Krasinski-directed fantasy "IF," scheduled for release in May.

Daniel Arkin is a national reporter at NBC News.

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New York Takes Crucial Step Toward Making Congestion Pricing a Reality

The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to approve a new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan. The plan still faces challenges from six lawsuits before it can begin in June.

By Winnie Hu and Ana Ley

New York City completed a crucial final step on Wednesday in a decades-long effort to become the first American city to roll out a comprehensive congestion pricing program, one that aims to push motorists out of their cars and onto mass transit by charging new tolls to drive into Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

The program could start as early as mid-June after the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that will install and manage the program, voted 11-to-1 to approve the final tolling rates, which will charge most passenger cars $15 a day to enter at 60th Street and below in Manhattan. The program is expected to reduce traffic and raise $1 billion annually for public transit improvements.

It was a historic moment for New York’s leaders and transportation advocates after decades of failed attempts to advance congestion pricing even as other gridlocked cities around the world, including London, Stockholm and Singapore, proved that similar programs could reduce traffic and pollution.

While other American cities have introduced related concepts by establishing toll roads or closing streets to traffic, the plan in New York is unmatched in ambition and scale.

Congestion pricing is expected to reduce the number of vehicles that enter Lower Manhattan by about 17 percent, according to a November study by an advisory committee reporting to the M.T.A. The report also said that the total number of miles driven in 28 counties across the region would be reduced.

“This was the right thing to do,” Janno Lieber, the authority’s chairman and chief executive, said after the vote. “New York has more traffic than any place in the United States, and now we’re doing something about it.”

Congestion pricing has long been a hard sell in New York, where many people commute by car from the boroughs outside of Manhattan and the suburbs, in part because some of them do not have access to public transit.

New York State legislators finally approved congestion pricing in 2019 after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo helped push it through. A series of recent breakdowns in the city’s subway system had underscored the need for billions of dollars to update its aging infrastructure.

It has taken another five years to reach the starting line. Before the tolling program can begin, it must be reviewed by the Federal Highway Administration, which is expected to approve it.

Congestion pricing also faces legal challenges from six lawsuits that have been brought by elected officials and residents from across the New York region. Opponents have increasingly mobilized against the program in recent months, citing the cost of the tolls and the potential environmental effects from shifting traffic and pollution to other areas as drivers avoid the tolls.

A court hearing is scheduled for April 3 and 4 on a lawsuit brought by the State of New Jersey, which is seen as the most serious legal challenge. The mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., Mark J. Sokolich, has filed a related lawsuit.

Four more lawsuits have been brought in New York: by Ed Day, the Rockland County executive; by Vito Fossella, the Staten Island borough president, and the United Federation of Teachers; and by two separate groups of city residents.

Amid the litigation, M.T.A. officials have suspended some capital construction projects that were to be paid for by the program, and they said at a committee meeting on Monday that crucial work to modernize subway signals on the A and C lines had been delayed.

Nearly all the toll readers have been installed, and will automatically charge drivers for entering the designated congestion zone at 60th Street or below. There is no toll for leaving the zone or driving around in it. Through traffic on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the West Side Highway will not be tolled.

Under the final tolling structure, which was based on recommendations by the advisory panel, most passenger vehicles will be charged $15 a day from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. The toll will be $24 for small trucks and charter buses, and will rise to $36 for large trucks and tour buses. It will be $7.50 for motorcycles.

Those tolls will be discounted by 75 percent at night, dropping the cost for a passenger vehicle to $3.75.

Fares will go up by $1.25 for taxis and black car services, and by $2.50 for Uber and Lyft. Passengers will be responsible for paying the new fees, and they will be added to every ride that begins, ends or occurs within the congestion zone. There will be no nighttime discounts. (The new fees come on top of an existing congestion surcharge that was imposed on for-hire vehicles in 2019.)

The tolls will mostly be collected using the E-ZPass system. Electronic detection points have been placed at entrances and exits to the tolling zone. Drivers who do not use an E-ZPass will pay significantly higher fees — for instance, $22.50 instead of $15 during peak hours for passenger vehicles.

Emergency vehicles like fire trucks, ambulances and police cars, as well as vehicles carrying people with disabilities, were exempted from the new tolls under the state’s congestion pricing legislation .

As for discounts, low-income drivers who make less than $50,000 annually can apply to receive half off the daytime toll after their first 10 trips in a calendar month. In addition, low-income residents of the congestion zone who make less than $60,000 a year can apply for a state tax credit.

All drivers entering the zone directly from four tolled tunnels — the Lincoln, Holland, Hugh L. Carey and Queens-Midtown — will receive a “crossing credit” that will be applied against the daytime toll. The credit will be $5 round-trip for passenger vehicles, $12 for small trucks and intercity and charter buses, $20 for large trucks and tour buses, and $2.50 for motorcycles. No credits will be offered at night.

Grace Ashford contributed reporting.

Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City. More about Winnie Hu

Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering New York City’s mass transit system and the millions of passengers who use it. More about Ana Ley