The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. “Queerness,” as such, and its Spanish-language variant “cuir,” have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

This chapter argues that the New York School of Poets occupy a complex transitional moment in relation to both the history of sexuality and the history of poetry and modern art. Their work is governed by both the epistemology of the closet that shapes high modernism from earlier in the twentieth century and, looking forward to Stonewall and Gay Liberation, also presents utopian potentialities in its experimental forms of sociability.

Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

This article traces the evolving modes of queer print culture in the 20th and 21st century.  From little magazines, avant-garde presses, and overseas publication in the 1920s, through the rise of pulp paperbacks and adult bookstores during the Cold War, through the emergence of feminist and queer presses in the 1990s, to ebooks, social media, and self-publishing in the 21st century, queer writing appears in diverse forms, across the full range of respectability and price points in the publishing ecosystem. Mainstream publishers’ interest in queer lives ebbs and flows, but queer print culture is opportunistic, piggy-backing on any number of niche publishing markets, taking advantage of loopholes and ephemeral publishing trends.  The rise of queer young adult fiction, from the queer fan fiction of the 1990s, suggests the ongoing inventiveness, resilience, and creativity of queer literature as it finds readers and creates new forms of writing and reading.

Attending to the tropological imagination of Progressive Era U.S. immigration, this chapter maps what Michel Foucault calls “the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body” to narrate a queer history of the social body itself. In so doing, the chapter animates a variety of period figurations of mass immigration—including racial indigestion and race suicide—to trace a new genealogy of the literary erotics of Asian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, the ethnic groups that most threatened the whiteness of the social body. Reading across representations of immigration in the works of Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far, Jennie June, Emanuel Carnevali, and Emma Lazarus, this chapter shifts the history of sexuality from one located in individual bodies to theorize a sexuality of the population.

This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century literature. Specifically the texts Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriett Jacobs, Our Nig (1859) by Harriett E. Wilson, “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, as well as the pro-slavery text, The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker are placed in conversation and tension to examine how cruelty against slaves and free Black people expose the vexed queer encounters of the antebellum period. Rather than thinking of queerness as solely same-sex sexual acts, this argument extends a theory of racial sexuation that considers violence extended by masters, mistresses, and non-slave owning whites as imbued by fantasies and desires about Blackness as sexually open, unruly gendered, and innately erotic. Lastly, in reading texts pertaining to the conditions of slaves and free Black people, this essay interrogates how the racial sexual relations that are present under slavery extend beyond the confines of the plantation.

The term “romantic friendship” was coined in eighteenth-century England to describe relationships between women that were passionate, intense, and exclusive. The sexual potential of such relationships were seldom discussed by those outside the dyad. When two women of the aristocracy, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, ran off together in 1778, their friends were relieved to know that “no serious impropriety had been committed” because, as one of them wrote, “There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.” Romantic friendship between women, depicted in several eighteenth- and nineteen-century American literary works, was described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1849 as “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life.” The term “Boston marriage” was coined in the late nineteenth century, when women’s increasing economic independence—enjoyed particularly by the “New Woman”—meant that their same-sex love relationship need no longer be a “rehearsal” for heterosexual marriage. With the popular dissemination in the twentieth century of the ideas of late-nineteenth sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, romantic friendships and Boston marriages came under suspicion as being “sexually inverted” or “lesbian” and therefore pathological.

The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”