In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

    He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society.With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist.Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is the repressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and Magic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDS musical Zero Patience, Gregg Bordowitz's video Fast Trip, Long Drop, the Names Project Quilt, and the annual Day without Art.

    Conflicts surrounding homosexuality and creative freedom have shaped the history of modern art in America. Outlaw Representation traces this history by showing how gay artists have both resisted and responded to the threat of censorship. It features nearly two hundred images, ranging from the work of Robert Mapplethorpe to gay liberation posters.

    Contrary to the silence ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. As a contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

    Halperin revisits and refines the argument he put forward in his classic One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. How to Do the History of Homosexuality expands on this view, updates it, answers its critics, and makes greater allowance for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.Dealing both with male homosexuality and with lesbianism, this study imparts to the history of sexuality a renewed sense of adventure and daring. It recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's epochal work, salvaging Foucault's insights from common misapprehensions and making them newly available to historians, so that they can once again provide a powerful impetus for innovation in the field. Far from having exhausted Foucault's revolutionary ideas, Halperin maintains that we have yet to come to terms with their startling implications. Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin questions the tendency among scholars to reduce the history of sexuality to a mere history of sexual classifications instead of a history of human subjectivity itself. Finally, in a theoretical tour de force, Halperin offers an altogether new strategy for approaching the history of homosexuality—one that can accommodate both ruptures and continuities, both identity and difference in sexual experiences across time and space.Impassioned but judicious, controversial but deeply informed, How to Do the History of Homosexuality is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.

    Lesbian Erotica. Lesbian Identity. In Spanish and English on inverted pages. This philosophical exploration of the fantasy of being a lesbian is a poetic vision from the heart of the matriarchy. FOR THE HARD ONES/PARA LAS DURAS looks at different aspects of lesbianism, from the fingernails and the tongue to the literature and the herstory. A lesbian manifesto for hardcore dykes, baby dykes and wanna-be lesbians, FOR THE HARD ONES/PARA LAS DURAS is a lesbian celebration in Spanish and English, written by Colombian-American queer activist and librarian, tatiana de la tierra.

    The poet H.D. (1886-1961) was in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna during the spring of 1933 and again in the fall of 1934. She visited him daily at his study at 19 Berggasse, while outside Nazi thugs and militia bullied their way through the streets. Freud was old, and fragile. H.D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which seemed to have reached a dead end, for all her success. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which were poured her memories of the past and associations in the presentand from which she emerged reborn. H.D. came to Freud at the urging of her companion, the novelist Bryher (1884-1983), the daughter of a wealthy British shipping magnate. Freud welcomed H.D. as a creative spirit whose work he respected, but he did ask her not to prepare for their sessions, write about them in her journal, or talk about them with her friends, especially Bryher, who remained home in England. H.D.'s letters from Vienna filled the gap. Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant with detail, they revolve around her hours with Freud, making her correspondence unique in the spectrum of reminiscences, journals, memoirs, and biographies swirling around the legacy of the "Professor" and the movement he founded. The volume includes H.D. and Bryher's letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D. and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others. Fully annotated with Index and Photographs

    Few books have addressed research for teachers to turn to as a resource for classroom practice but here Kumashiro draws on interviews with gay activists as a starting point for discussion of models of reading and challenging oppression.

    A fresh and revelatory look at sexuality in the Great Age of movie making, Screened Out shows how much gay and lesbian lives have shaped the Big Screen. Spanning popular American cinema from the 1900s until today, distinguished film historian Richard Barrios presents a rich, compulsively readable analysis of how Hollywood has used and depicted gays and the mixed signals it has given us: Marlene in a top hat, Cary Grant in a negligee, a pansy cowboy in The Dude Wrangler. Such iconoclastic images, Barrios argues, send powerful messages about tragedy and obsession, but also about freedom and compassion, even empowerment.Mining studio records, scripts, drafts (including cut scenes), censor notes, reviews, and recollections of viewers, Barrios paints our fullest picture yet of how gays and lesbians were portrayed by the dream factory, warning that we shouldn't congratulate ourselves quite so much on the progress movies - and the real world -- have made since Stonewall.Captivating, myth-breaking, and funny, Screened Out is for all film aficionados and for anyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and drawn strength and a sense of identity from what they saw on screen, no matter how fleeting or coded.

    Protégé of Alain Locke, roommate of Wallace Thurman, and friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the precocious Nugent stood for many years as the only African-American writer willing to clearly pronounce his homosexuality in print. His contribution to the landmark publication FIRE!!, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," was unprecedented in its celebration of same-sex desire. A resident of the notorious "Niggeratti Manor," Nugent also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (the 1927 play) and Run, Little Chillun (1933).Thomas H. Wirth, a close friend of Nugent's during the last years of the artist's life, has assembled a selection of Nugent's most important writings, paintings, and drawings-works mostly unpublished or scattered in rare and obscure publications and collected here for the first time. Wirth has written an introduction providing biographical information about Nugent's life and situating his art in relation to the visual and literary currents which influenced him. A foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasizes the importance of Nugent for African American history and culture.

    Derived in part from the slang lexicons of numerous stigmatised and itinerant groups, Polari was also a means of socialising, acting out camp performances and reconstructing a shared gay identity and worldview among its speakers. This book examines the ways in which Polari was used in order to construct 'gay identities', linking its evolution to the changing status of gay men and lesbians in the UK over the past fifty years.

    Out/Lines features a resurrection of erotic gay images, once virtually buried and invisible, that circulated in clandestine communities whose sexualized visibility was a potentially devastating risk—a wealth of approximately 200 previously unpublished "obscene" images from the queer pre-Stonewall underground.Drawn mainly from American, German, Italian, and French sources, these images will both broaden and tantalize our view of queer culture with a surprising range of historical styles and motifs. While many of the artists remain anonymous or unknown, some have begun to have increasing notoriety on the erotic gay market. Works include images from a 1945 booklet of 20 unofficial illustrations for Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers; the British artist known as "Hank," whose steamy couplets called "Homo Hotel" featured hot, horny sailors and Cliff Richards haircuts; the increasingly well-known American artist Neel Bate, whose nom de crayon was "Blade"; and numerous contemporaries and admirers of the legendary erotic artist Tom of Finland.Waugh’s narrative considers both fantasy and history by exploring the cultural and erotic dynamics and the social context in which these secret, sexualized images were created and collected. Historically rigorous and aesthetically explicit, Out/Lines is sure to shock and astonish.Thomas Waugh teaches film studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. He is a critic, public lecturer, and festival programmer, and is the author of Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall.

    International scientific institutions and news organizations quickly constructed a "place" for AIDS in the global imaginary: from the heart of Africa and gay bathhouses in San Francisco to the back streets of Southeast Asia and poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the United States. Such simplistic accounts helped recycle racist ideas about Africans and Asians, intensified homophobic visions of irresponsible gay sexuality, and ignored the scientific and human reality of local experiences of the epidemic. In Globalizing AIDS, pioneering cultural critic Cindy Patton looks at the complex interaction between modern science, media coverage, and local activism during the first decade of the epidemic. Patton's critique of both the production of scientific credibility and the implementation of public health policy at the local level offers a bold reevaluation of how we think about AIDS and an innovative way to approach the reality of the disease. Cindy Patton is a Winship Distinguished Researcher at Emory University. She is the author of Fatal Advice (1996) and Inventing AIDS (1990).

    How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public? According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover. Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.