The Queer Renaissance by Robert McRuer

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots, open representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were rare, and still uncommon in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s that changed. The Queer Renaissance names the outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets and playwrights in those decades, and is one of the first books to analyze it critically and to consider gay male and lesbian writers together. McRuer examines how this creative wave worked in tandem with radical queer politics, through writers including Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tony Kushner and Sarah Schulman, questioning the divide between art and activism. The book also considers how queer theory intersects with cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory and Chicano/a theory.