This chapter serves as an introduction to the polemical dismissal of Epicurean teachings as sub-masculine and morally suspect. Epicureans are shown to figured as sexually receptive and effeminate by their ideological opponents. I argue that Lucretius accepts these criticisms and turns them around to show that Roman men are equally effeminate and penetrable. Objective, empirical observation of nature and physics proves that everyone, regardless of biological sex and sociological gender, is rendered penetrable and vulnerable by the constant issue and reception of atoms.

Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.

Anglophone Caribbean literature written by Black women writers across the diaspora in the 1980s emerges as a transformative, genre-bending, and defiant force. This period of Caribbean literature marks a period of transition that reflects the contradictory experiences of postcolonial island nations grappling with governance, migration, failed and uneven development, and the unfinished (failed) project of decolonization. Caribbean women writers during this period addressed this project through multiple genres and paid careful attention to the lives of women who countered the male-dominated Caribbean literary canon of the 1920s–1970s. The evolution of Black women’s writing across the diaspora from the 1980s and into the 1990s reflects a clear shift and response to the interlocking systems of oppression affecting the lives of Black women. For Caribbean migrant and Caribbean American Black women, these intersections and complexities are layered with the traumatic experiences of migration and coloniality while grappling with place and space, subjectivity and sexuality, identity and self-worth.

This chapter critiques a tendency by masculine critics and writers in the 1980s toward binary framing that led to a misassignment of responsibility and misreading of Black women’s literary production. The framework reduces our capacity to read Black literature of this era through its intelligence about gender, to appreciate that Black literature in the 1980s might be read for its attention to and expansion of gender as a category for racial analysis. This chapter animates the gender-thinking in Black male writers’ representations of masculinity by collating the work of Essex Hemphill with that of Ernest J. Gaines. By pairing these two writers, the chapter exemplifies a gender study that refuses the simplistic rejection of Black women’s writing, and instead amplifies the legacy of Black feminist intersectional thought. This comparative reading moves away from pitting Black men against Black women, since to do so is to marginalize writers and their work. Furthermore, it rectifies the general exclusion of queer writers from the category “Black male writers,” akin to the canonical categorization of Black women’s writing that often includes queer women and scenes of queerness.

While debates may rage around issues of sexuality, sexual identity and sexuality-based rights, if we are to believe what we hear from some of our political leaders and sections of the media, concerns over sexuality itself should be settled outside of schools. Sexuality, they would argue, is too mature, too controversial and quite simply a biological fact that has no relevance to schooling. However, disturbing stories and statistics point to the significant challenges faced by students, and these surely warrant attention.

With this in mind, this chapter examines some of the questions that often arise when talking about sexualities: Are gender and sexuality the same thing? Is sexuality ‘all about sex’? And what does school have to do with any of this? By unpacking some of the emergent literature in the field, the chapter will suggest that dominant discourses around sexualities ߝ in this case, heteronormativity ߝ are up for challenge.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which topics and methodological approaches from LGBTI/Queer Studies have influenced LGBTI/Queer biblical interpretation.

This chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s experiments in animal biography. It opens by presenting Woolf’s unpublished draft ‘Authorities’ note to Flush: A Biography (1933) as evidence of her knowing engagement with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, before going on to read that text alongside her first experiment in the genre, Orlando: A Biography (1928). In doing so, the chapter draws on correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the latter’s rarely discussed book Faces: Profiles of Dogs (1961), to illustrate how canine companions take centre stage in their amorous discourse. It then turns to another overlooked intertext, Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, to show Woolf’s queering of his early modern belief that hares can change sex from female to male. Finally, the chapter places Flush in dialogue with a lesser-known dog biography the Woolfs considered for publication at the Hogarth Press (and which Woolf cleverly alludes to in her canine biography): Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) by composer, memoirist and suffragette Ethel Smyth.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the armature supporting James Baldwin’s 1972 book, No Name in the Street. Just a few pages into the book, Baldwin observes: “Since Martin’s death, something has altered in me, something has gone away.” A spate of assassinations, and particularly King’s, prompts a profound crisis in Baldwin, forcing him to reexamine the ultimate power of love that had governed his life and work. Indeed, a decade earlier in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin had identified love as the key existential and political instrument to guide America out of its “racial nightmare,” in the same way that King had drawn on the Christian notion of agape love to imagine and enact nonviolent direct action to transform Jim Crow America. For Baldwin, King’s murder begins to actualize the apocalypse against which he had forewarned in the early 1960s, and moreover forces him to reckon with his own worldview of human life: “Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make.” At the end of the 1960s, gone is the tempered optimism of Fire, the hope of achieving America, and instead we find in No Name a markedly new form of disenchantment that even love couldn’t temper. This essay traces how Baldwin’s perspective on love, loss, and life is altered by a decade rife with transformation and devastation, illuminating not only a pivotal period of Baldwin’s life and writing, but also of American life and letters.

Hughes is widely regarded as the Harlem Renaissance’s most eminent Black queer literary figure, yet mapping this repute poses a weighty challenge. Rather than add yet another layer to the debate over Hughes’s sexual identity, this chapter surveys the queer content in his published writings with a view toward sketching the author’s role as a Black queer artist. This chapter takes the position that a foremost responsibility of the contemporary reader is to understand that to read Hughes’s work as queer art through a twenty-first-century sensibility would limit what Hughes’s queer literary art achieves. As with questions about his engagement with leftism, his position on Black uplift, and his temperament regarding the Harlem Renaissance itself, Hughes’s literary art demands to be read in its dense historical, cultural contexts, and in accordance with the author’s passionately private aesthetic.

This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973). It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Literary practice is a distinctive form of historical thinking and early medieval culture is an important component of literary creativity and innovation in the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter examines the opportunities early medieval English poetry afforded writers and scholars in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Modern writers in this period negotiated the medieval past in their work in different ways. Outright hostility sits alongside an awareness that thinking of the medieval is a necessary component of modern culture. To give a sense of this literary engagement, this chapter offers an account of Old English at the mid-century in relation to four profoundly different writers, Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Gavin Bone (1907–1942), Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894–1983), and Angus Wilson (1913–1991). The work of these writers and scholars demonstrates that early medieval culture is part of a broader post-War inquiry into society, culture, sexuality, race and ethnocentrism.

The introduction considers the appeal Decadence and the work of Oscar Wilde held for queer, cosmopolitan subjects in the early-twentieth century who wished to reimagine structures of kinship. Decadence’s association with sexual dissidence and curiosity along with Wilde’s reputation as a sexual martyr informed the thinking of authors and artists in the twentieth century who worked to generate alternatives to heteronormative practices of affiliation. These figures operated alongside but saw themselves as distinct from high modernist networks, turning to the fin de siècle past to express their sense of distinction from the aesthetic modes in fashion at the time. While Wilde’s capacity for reimagining new modes of kinship informed more liberatory strains of twentieth-century Decadence, his interest in age-differentiated eroticism and the more general tendency to Orientalism within the Decadent Movement also inflected the practices marked by his influence during this period. The introduction thus stresses that the kinship experiments of twentieth-century Decadents carried forward the many political valences of their source material and that their work should be approached through the framework of what Kadji Amin has called “deidealization,” a mode of queer historical practice that acknowledges that queer alternatives are not always just alternatives.

Chapter Five turns to the Harlem Renaissance author and illustrator Richard Bruce Nugent, arguing that his “Geisha Man,” which centers on the erotic relationship between a white American father and his mixed-race child, should be understood as emerging from his sustained engagement with Decadence and the Salome story. I position this work within the framework of Nugent’s extensive experimentation with Decadence to argue that the text’s Orientalism and its preoccupation with incest should be understood as more than a simple echoing of Decadence’s more troubling tendencies. This content operates within the text in service to Nugent’s efforts to conceptualize mixed-race identity and the rupturing of Black kinship structures within the United States. Salome is for Nugent a story about a fetishized performer attempting to enact erotic agency within a system of fractured familial formations, and revising her story allows Nugent to theorize kinship and multiraciality in relationship to what Hortense Spillers refers to as the “losses” and “confusions” that accompanied the “dispersal of the historic African American domestic unit.” This chapter sheds light on the manner in which Orientalist Decadence was transported across the Atlantic to perform different types of service for Black thinkers in Harlem in the early-twentieth century.

Chapter Three focuses on Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s choice to rethink their marriage in highly unconventional terms, allowing one another to conduct affairs with other partners, spending a great deal of time apart while at the same time remaining committed to an ideal of loving friendship with one another. They came to this agreement while living abroad on the Italian island of Capri and mingling with the queer expatriate community of Decadent aesthetes on the island. This chapter relies on analysis of the Mackenzies’ life writing and fiction as well as extensive work with their diaries, notebooks, and correspondence to develop an understanding of the rhythms of their alternative form of affiliation and the manner in which their porous bond was influenced by their time on Capri. Throughout the chapter, I consider the role of place in the Mackenzies’ experiences, the manner in which the islandness of Capri enabled and sheltered queer experiments in connection, while at the same time attending to the manner in which visitors to Capri extracted pleasure from the island and its inhabitants, approaching the site according to an ethos of “Mediterraneanism” that structurally resembles Orientalism.

Chapter Six considers the modernist sculptor Eric Gill’s highly unconventional family life, his interest in Indian art, and his connections with Decadent queer Catholicism in relationship to his preoccupation with the family as a site of divine eroticism. While Gill is often thought of as a “distinctly heterosexual” figure with a highly provincial vision, during the 1910s he affiliated himself with a authors and artists, including Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael Field”), whose nonnormative sexual identities were intertwined with their Catholic religious identity, and he exhibited a thirst for information about global artistic practices, writing frequently to the Ceylonese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and engaging extensively with Indian art. He found in Bradley and Cooper, who converted to Catholicism and wrote religious verse concerning their union, a model for conceiving of incestuous desire in divine terms. In his correspondence with Coomaraswamy concerning the treatment of eroticism in Hindu temple sculpture, he found models for the successful integration of faith and sensuality. This network of influences resulted in one of his most well-known works, They (or Ecstasy, 1910-11), an attempt to hallow incestuous desire and transform an extreme form of sexual dissidence into an expression of divine love.

Chapter Two centers on Laurence and Clemence Housman, siblings who spent their entire lives living and working together in a collaborative relationship that more closely resembled a marriage. The two cooperated in the production of suffrage posters and engraved book illustrations, and their early acts of collaboration informed Laurence’s later activism work as he contested war and British imperialism. Laurence and Clemence’s radical mode of familial affiliation became the locus for larger forms of political dissidence. Laurence believed that radical politics might emerge from a radical kinship practice that fostered an ethics of service and care. With this in mind, I tie his early feminist work in collaboration with his sister to his later anticolonial work in the Indian independence movement. I also consider Laurence’s handling of his brother A. E. Housman’s posthumous papers, which revealed Alfred’s unrequited love for his friend Moses Jackson. His role as executor of Alfred’s estate placed Laurence in the practical position of weighing his kinship ties against broader political commitments. The carefulness with which he carried out his responsibilities to his brother and to the greater political good reveal how skilled Laurence was at braiding together kinship ties and wider modes of affiliation.

Chapter One argues that Vyvyan Holland forged a textual relationship with his father Oscar Wilde while collaborating with early Wilde scholars in the editing of Wilde’s letters and extended his father’s practice of importing sexually dissident content from abroad while translating works by the French modernist Julien (or Julian) Green. Following Wilde’s trials, his sons were separated from their mother and from one another and shuttled between various boarding schools abroad, an experience Holland described as deeply traumatic and lonely. His existence was devastated by the effects of late-Victorian sexual legislation, which divided him from his family. But, when he came of age, he found community with a network of men who loved Wilde and loved books, locating himself amidst other forms of relationality and affection. This chapter asserts that Holland modeled his own cosmopolitan aesthetic on his father’s, remaining similarly detached from and skeptical of English moral sensibilities, and focuses on how the translation of queer modernist texts allowed him to obliquely continue his father’s queer cosmopolitan project. Holland was able to find his way back to his father through textual acts, acts of cosmopolitan collaboration and translation, and by generating an alternative familial bond with early Wilde scholars.

Patrick Mullen returns to familiar textual moments to discover new forms of Joyce’s subversion of dominant discourses. He detects in moments in “The Dead” such as Lily’s exchange with Gabriel, Molly Ivors’ discussion with Gabriel, and Gabriel’s thoughts on Michael Furey a kind of queerness he associates with “heteronormative failure”: the refusal to marry, the rejection of conventional gender roles, and the experience of homoerotic desire. Adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the sexual closet, he writes of the pantry as the emblem and at times the literal location in Joyce’s story of these alternative behaviors. He traces the subtle presence of these non-normative behaviors in the story’s free indirect discourse; in contrast to the unfettered access to an individual’s thoughts purportedly offered by the stream of consciousness, “The Dead” contains in its conventional third-person narrative voice marginalized perspectives that form unexpected alliances across the globe.