Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

This chapter investigates the literary practices by which twentieth-century Black queer writers have simultaneously utilized, challenged, and modified the generic conventions of autobiography. They do so, Abdur-Rahman argues, to articulate nonnormative pleasures and collective politics that are not readily conveyed by standard autobiographical writing. Because autobiography typically follows the trajectory of a linear narrative of progress, conventional autobiographies capture neither the complicated histories of African diasporic subjects nor the quotidian experiences and social conditions that shape collective Black life and politics. Queer autobiographies typically take the form of the coming-out narrative, which emphasizes the primacy of sexuality over other components of personal identity and other forms of (communal) becoming and belonging. Abdur-Rahman deploys recent reconfigurations of sexual disclosure from "coming out to inviting in" to argue that Black queer life writing redefines the domains around which sexual identities are believed to cohere.