Queers Read This!

Abstract

IntroductionIs there such a thing as LGBTQ literature anymore?Clearly, the Lambda Literary Foundation thinks so, since it recognizes and awards emergent and established LGBTQ authors annually.Even the prodigious scholarship of queer theorists is now celebrated by the organization at its yearly award ceremony, alongside work in fiction, poetry, autobiography, comics, and graphic novels.Yet, as the lesbian author and cultural critic Sarah Schulman (2012: 146 -47) compellingly points out in The Gentrification of the Mind, the mainstream literary world rarely spotlights the work of out LGBTQ writers who develop substantive fiction, poetry, and drama about equally out and actively sexual characters.If in 1973 gay and straight Americans alike made a lesbian novel such as Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle a national best seller, and if James Baldwin could spend his entire career writing and speaking about the intersections between race, masculinity, and homosexuality throughout the second half of the twentieth century, in 2017 no book by an out LGBTQ writer can claim such widespread appeal outside a few recent notable exceptions like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006) or now-canonical works such as Tony Kushner's play Angels in America (1991 -93) and Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple (1982).In 1991, at the apogee of the AIDS epidemic, members of the emergent activist group Queer Nation could garner the attention of potential LGBTQ audiences with a searing polemic titled "QUEERS READ THIS!"This command was meant to hail politically radicalized or "militant" queers as well as the most woefully conformist or disengaged members of the LGBTQ community.The polemic's exclamatory title not only issued a directive at so-called queers to read the content of the manifesto but also evoked an affective hope that the very act of reading might incite a transformative encounter with queer rage against both GLQ 24:2-3

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