In the thirty years that have passed since the publication of Alan Bray's landmark book Homosexuality in Renaissance England, feminist and queer scholars have asked and answered the question - how queer was the transvestite theatre, in a variety of ways. This chapter describes some salient trends that have shaped critical interpretations of three transvestite comedies: William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, John Lyly's Galatea, and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl. It provides the diverse ways conjunctions of transvestism and homoeroticism obtain both on the early modern stage and in early modern culture. The chapter uses the term "queer" to signify an array of social and sexual practices, arrangements, and peoples that, when put into discourse, confront or undermine the (perceived) dominant culture's views on gender and sexuality. It deployes "queer" to designate those conjunctions of crossdressing and same-sex desire that in the process of challenging dominant beliefs and attitudes, imagine alternative arrangements and practices.

The African presence in the United States and the construction of American black identity has a history of being sexualized. From this perspective, writing about racialization has often meant writing about sexual relations. Increasingly, scholars have drawn attention not simply to the sexualization of the black body, but also to the historical construction of sexual desire in the writings of African Americans. This chapter explores the representation of same-sex desire as well as the emergence of transgressive ideas about sexuality in these writings. It considers African American writing and cultural expression from the antebellum period until 1930. The chapter outlines the significance of representations of nonnormative sexuality in African American expressive culture that become the context for late twentieth-century works by self-identified gay and lesbian artists. Critical treatments have consistently shown that the logic of enslavement was perverse not simply in the abuse and misuses of power but in the sexual dynamics it encouraged and even required.

The discovery of historical genders and sexualities offers the possibility of establishing continuities between the past and present that allow for identification and a more nuanced understanding of contemporary categories. Sexually, femininity was defined by the passive position in heterosexual intercourse, and yet, one of the principal medieval associations with femininity was sexual voracity. The survey of genders and sexualities discussed in this chapter is organized around a few configurations found in medieval literary texts. Beginning in the twelfth century, the literature of romance initiated a new model of heroic masculinity in tandem with the invention of heterosexual courtly love. Same-sex desire in the Middle Ages appears most often in the context of friendship. Virginity provided a kind of gender transitivity for women in a way that it did not for male saints. Finally, the chapter addresses literary representations of gender transgression and sexual acts between members of the same sex.