This chapter discusses how writing emerging out of Gay Liberation in the 1970s offered an alternative to the masculine heteronormativity that dominated the Australian literary tradition. Emphasised that the personal was political, it foregrounded private sensuality, an exploration of the everyday, and a critique of gay discrimination. The chapter traces the development of a diversifying community in the 1980s through writing collectives, anthologies, and journals. A broadening of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ poetry in the 1990s and 2000s was informed by queer understandings of sexuality. It saw lesbian writers test the limits of lyrical poetry and an era of mainstream popularity, as exemplified in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. The chapter considers how LGBTQ+ poets of colour have critiqued ideas of national belonging and white subjecthood. It then discusses the exploration of embodiment, including the turn to autotheory by contemporary trans and genderqueer writers, resistance of ableist discourses, and the navigation of illness, such as AIDS, mental illness, and chronic pain.

This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

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 traces queer and trans North American memoir through the long twentieth century by engaging the reality that for the majority of people in the majority of that period sexual identities did not adhere in a straight/gay binary and gender identities did not adhere in a cis/trans binary. To answer the challenge posed by this historical reality, this chapter proposes a theory of queer and trans memoir rooted in the racializing and classed gendering regimes and sexual arrangements of the period. This theory then guides the chapter through its engagement with the minoritized works of queer and trans memoir, skirting the white bourgeois gay male genealogy from Oscar Wilde to Edmund White that has too often been proffered as the geneology of LGBT literature.

This essay on the American literary history of trans before the inception of modern transness examines such practices and their critiques prior to modern technologies and taxonomies of trans subjecthood. By reading slave narratives, poetry, short fiction, and other genres from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, the chapter unravels the preoccupation with individual figures as trans or otherwise gender diverse in order to highlight how the uneven processes of colonial biopolitics attempt to discipline the messiness of lived collective expressions and embodied experiences. By foregrounding works on transing and gendering by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian writers alongside writings better known about white gender nonconformity, this chapter unsettles the racial innocence of transness and triumphalist claims about gender variance as universal. Through attending to structures that produce embodied legibility and practices of meaning-making, the aim is to orient readers to historically informed and theoretically nuanced ways of reading American literature before the twentieth century against tendencies to approach transness through the overrepresentation of whiteness.

This chapter explores male homoerotic desire, whether idealised, romanticised, visualised or physically enacted. Male homoerotic practices and relations have sometimes been structured around notions of difference between two males who were thought to be respectively masculine and feminine, active and passive, free and slave, or older and younger. The last pairing was particularly important in classical European antiquity where it was, typically, regarded as compatible with heterosexual marriage and reproduction. This should alert us to the fact that many societies across the globe have not viewed male homoerotic relations according to the set of sexualised identities that emerged from nineteenth century western medical science, and which have since been contested by gay liberationists and queer activists. Western imperial practice has produced an abundance of evidence concerning the legal and religious regulation of ‘sodomy’. This invites comparison with records from other cultures which have often been, in their various ways, more positive in their attitudes to same-sex desire. The chapter, therefore, includes a consideration of globally diverse patterns of male homoerotic relations that acknowledges the complexity of cultural responses to same-sex desire.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

In this chapter, I consider how translation pertains to the body on stage as a site of multiplicity and propose the term ‘transembodiment’ in my analysis of Weronika Szczawińska and Bartosz Frąckowiak’s Komornicka. Biografia pozorna (Komornicka. Ostensible biography, 2011). My intention in considering transembodiment is to analyse the effects and limitations of physical and fictional bodies as they appear within the mimetic, representational and concrete frame of the theatre space. Ultimately, I argue that the body is itself a paradigmatic site of translation, which can neither be reduced to nor fully dislodged from language, and which is both submitted to and escapes processes of mimetic representation. In this way, I do not offer transembodiment as a methodology but rather as a structure and a consequence of the process of transmission in the theatre that invites new subjects to emerge and come into being.

The epilogue argues that the surprising resistance to “true sex” in both nineteenth-century literature and medicine prefigures the contemporary resistance to medical sex assignment surgery for patients born with intersex traits. In nineteenth-century France, the medical management of “hermaphrodism” did not systematically render it invisible by attempting to shape the body to align with cultural beliefs about binary gender. For starters, most of the technology did not yet exist. In the period before it became available – much of which was later necessary for those trans people who desired to modify their bodies in order to reflect their own gender identities – doctors responses to ambiguous sex and the sex determinations they made varied almost as much as the bodies of the people who came to see them; and, in some ways, technological limitations, a legal blind spot, and the lack of medical consensus on “hermaphrodism” afforded some individuals freedom to live their lives outside of medical control in a way that became virtually impossible in the twentieth century. The intersex rights movement finally brought about the rejection of John Money’s theories, and gave rise to new medical protocols for intersex patients.

Trish Salah contextualizes the broad post-2010 emergence of transgender fiction in a longer history of earlier trans and queer fiction and theory while arguing that “trans genre writing” has found recent prominence as a new minor literature. Particular challenges have led trans writers to innovate at the levels of language and aesthetics, perspective (collective, but not homogeneous), and genre, among others. Moreover, these works thematize and challenge norms and imperatives of empire, race, history, visibility, and geography.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex persons are at particular risk of being targeted because of their gender or sexual preference. Discrimination against LGBTI persons may be based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics. The chapter looks first at the right to life of LGBTI persons under global standards. This comprises extrajudicial executions by State agents, the failure to exercise due diligence in protecting LGBTI persons, and the imposition of the death penalty for homosexual activity. In nine States, the penal code prescribes the death penalty as a possible judicial sanction for same-sex sexual activity.

This chapter considers the ways in which Gothic as a mode interacts with queer history generally and with the history of AIDS and queer communities more specifically within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts. This chapter examines the elision of the histories of Gothic, AIDS and queer sexuality in four texts that marked different stages of the evolution of the AIDS discourse. The first half of the chapter focuses on individual and collective community trauma in the first decade of the AIDS pandemic as represented in Tony Scott’s 1983 arthouse vampire film The Hunger and Todd Haynes’s 1991 seminal New Queer Cinema triptych, Poison. The second half of this chapter considers the ongoing haunting from the first decade of AIDS trauma in the face of a devastating disease and the initial scapegoating of the queer community as the site of contagion. These hauntings are depicted in John Greyson’s 1993 AIDS musical satire, Zero Patience and Lilly and Lana Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski’s 2015–18 trans-genre television show, Sense8.