Given that outskirts of the city, which were mostly developed after swamplands were drained in the early twentieth century, suffered the lion’s share of the damage from the cataclysmic hurricane and levee failure of 2005, much of the writing of these areas is focused on loss and the power of writing to help one bear it. The first classic of the outskirts of the city is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which is focused on trauma and the struggle to recover from it, and thereby sets the stage for the great flowering of Black-themed writing from the suburbs in recent decades by Sara Broom, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Karisma Price, Rickey Laurentiis, Zachary Lazar, and Niyi Osundare, among many others. Many of these works, shaped by Katrina, voice anxiety about the natural environment, a theme first set forth for wide audiences in the graphic series, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and other dystopian visions, from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to Moira Crane’s The Not Yet to Beyoncé’s “Formation.”

Though Mailer published incisive and unapologetic criticism of the works of his contemporaries, he was also generous with his support of writers and his advocacy for literary freedom. He readily came to the defense of literature that was deemed obscene or controversial, and under threat of official ban, from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. His literary activism took consistent aim at publishing houses, which too often relied on money and marketing strategies to determine their publication choices. By protesting the promotion of already-wealthy writers and bringing little-known writers into the spotlight, Mailer not only proclaimed the force of his own work in post-war America but also defended a larger vision of literary freedom that endures today.

Queer art and literature demonstrate an awareness of how a permanent war culture constitutes the nation’s social fabric, thus defining the unavoidable contingencies informing LGBTQ+ persons’ desires and subjectivities as citizen-subjects. Along with race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, war culture operates intersectionally. This essay introduces four new approaches to LGBTQ+ art and literatures’ representation of queer subjectivities’ relationship to war culture: the desire for national inclusion and queer fetishizations of the war-state (Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal); activist-poets’ resistances to war culture as heteronormative and white supremacist (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg); the perceived “terrorism” of queer activist arts’ militancy (Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker); and addresses of globalized queer vulnerability after 9/11 and vis-à-vis the climate crisis (Gloria Anzaldúa, Kazim Ali, Ocean Vuong).