The Queer 1990s

We live in a moment when the cultural and political legacies of the 1990s are subject to frequent and contentious reassessment. From one angle, the 1990s are “back,” as tastemakers both earnestly and cynically cater to the nostalgia of a generation of “nineties kids,” some of whom are now equipped with modest consumer power, by proclaiming a return to the era's pop-cultural aesthetics. Yet 1990s nostalgia can also take on special valences for LGBTQ+ people, beset by what Kevin Murphy calls “the melancholy of homonormativity,” who yearn for the radicalism of ACT UP or Riot Grrrl culture or a time when sex-positivity or queer identity was seen to occupy an insurgent ground.

It might also plausibly be claimed that the 1990s have never left. Many of the period's grimmest geopolitical-economic legacies—from the retrenchment of the welfare state to the first U.S. invasion of Iraq on false pretenses to the intensification of neoliberal economic globalization to the dramatic expansion of the racist and xenophobic U.S. carceral state—continue to make life harder for many LGBTQ+ people throughout the world. And although Andrew Sullivan infamously fêted “The End of AIDS” in 1996, the uneven, racialized and classed geographies of HIV/AIDS continue to give the lie to such a claim.¹ There remains much to learn from contemporaneous political and scholarly responses to all of these grim material conditions in shedding light on the roots, limits, and promises of contemporary social movements and scholarship.² If the queer 1990s are not over, then it behooves us not to get over the 1990s.

This special issue convenes a lively space of exchange among scholars and activists concerning what might broadly be called the queer 1990s. We have included work that critically examines the geopolitical-economic and cultural contexts that generated queer politics and scholarship in the United States and other global sites, work that raises questions about which aspects of 1990s queer cultures, politics, and scholarship warrant renewed attention, repudiation, reformulation, or a mix of those.

The idea for this special issue germinated in conversations between two scholars whose political and scholarly formations belong to different decades. For Eve, who, as a graduate student at Rutgers University, helped to organize the 1991 Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers and Princeton Universities, the 1990s were a time when lesbian and gay studies (which was just beginning to include queer theory) became operational through multiple, intersecting activist movements—from feminist of color and lesbian sex positivity to protests on behalf of political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal to abortion clinic defense with Women's Health Action Network (WHAM) to community media activism and exhibition. For David, who spent the 1990s as a “protogay child,”³ the challenges posed and alternatives offered by queer theories and politics were first encountered as provisionally institutionalized knowledges in the queer-feminist undergraduate classroom at Macalester College in 2007, but subsequently reinforced and complicated by participation in antigentrification organizing and radical queer arts scenes in Minneapolis-St. Paul, a semester abroad spent in the archives of ACT UP-Paris, and an abiding scholarly interest in the cultural politics of 1990s Star Trek. As we began to compare notes about how our understandings of the legacies of the 1990s were shaped by our experiences with and proximity to the decade, the idea for a special issue took shape. It is fitting, then, that many of the pieces included in this issue merge personal recollection with analysis, interrogating the ways that an understanding of the significance of the past is always filtered through the lens of the present. At the same time, many contributions take as object of inquiry the affective power of memory, whether through exploring how a Spice Girls song, sung in 2022 by the queer Warsaw choir Voces Gaudii, can activate and reroute feelings of queer childhood shame, or how the contemporary gay conservative WalkAway movement weaponizes nostalgia for a gay 1990s by erasing its more radical legacies.

Just as the borders of past and present shift through recollection, the process of reviewing and editing the pieces in this special issue have compelled us to adopt an expansive view of the decade we are calling the 1990s. The historical continuities and connections made by our contributors suggest the usefulness of invoking “the long 1990s,” pieces of which often overlap into “the long 1980s” or “the long 2000s.” The construction of these various forms of periodization depends upon the temporal and geopolitical configurations from which the authors write, configurations that often shift within an author's life or within a piece itself.

Some of the questions that we asked contributors to consider were: Are the queer 1990s over? Are “we” over the queer 1990s? Whose queer 1990s? Where in the world do we find the queer 1990s? How queer were the 1990s throughout the globe? How can reconsiderations of the queer 1990s further provincialize queer theory or politics as a U.S. or Euro-American project? What affective traces of the queer 1990s call for attention, exploration, or retirement? What are the politics of revisitation? What are the different ways that the 1990s serve as origin story for contemporary forms of political organizing, cultural production, or scholarly discourse? And how do tropes of origin shape these forms and their future possibilities? What emblematic moments, texts, practices, institutions, or people do we want to remember or forget?

We chose the word “queer” for our special issue on the 1990s because it contains many of the central questions, developments, and debates taken up by our contributors. Although the decade of the 1990s was not the first time that the term “queer” had been used to denote a politicized identity or identity-based politics, this period witnessed its rise and eventual dominance as both an essential element in the growing acronym encompassing versions of LGBTQIA+ as well as an umbrella term that signaled a coalition across various forms of identity and identification. At the same time, the rise of the term “queer” characterized one of the central tensions of LGBTQIA+ politics in this decade: the simultaneous assertion of identity as a form of politics and the destabilization of identity articulated through poststructuralist theory. In other words, “queer” was used to claim a coherent and visible identity—one that took up space, made noise, and asserted political power—and to challenge the historical construction of identity categories that regulate and constrain current and future forms of expression and affinity.

As Christina B. Hanhardt writes in her contribution to this issue, the term “queer” was subject to scrutiny and debate as soon as it began to proliferate in political and academic discourse. She writes: “Was it a new self-claimed identity, or did it denote a structure, relation, or position? Might it refer only to sex, sexuality, or gender as distilled social or identificatory categories, or might race, nation, or class also outline relevant terms? What might be the relationship between social movements and academic scholarship?” Hanhardt's article tracks some of these early questions through the group Queer Nation, revealing that early debates about political strategy were closely tied to questions of whether queer politics constituted a revolutionary or liberal agenda, as well as how those terms were defined and for whom. Revisiting these early debates allows us to better see how various strains of queer politics have evolved and struggled for dominance.

The contributions to the special issue all attest in various forms to the imbrication of queer politics, queer scholarship, queer culture, and queer space, none of which can be fully understood without the others. Nevertheless, briefly highlighting each area is helpful to contextualize their particular historical relevance to the 1990s.

Queer Politics

Neoliberal economic retrenchment worldwide and the grinding expansion of a racist and xenophobic carceral state in the United States have dramatically deepened inequalities over the past three decades. Yet if the 1990s saw political and economic reforms that intensified inequalities, they also nurtured social movements, often led by queer and trans people, whose ideas have recently commanded significant attention and power. Consider the long-haul work of Critical Resistance for prison abolition in light of the global uprising against anti-Black state violence in 2020,⁴ or echoes of ACT UP's embrace of universal single-payer health care in contemporary democratic socialist movements.⁵ Tempering this history are the ways that feminist and queer organizing for hate crime legislation⁶ or against sexual labor have colluded with a neoliberal investment in prison and policing in what Elizabeth Bernstein has called “carceral feminism,” a trend that disproportionately harms trans people, poor people, and people of color.⁷

The rise of an abolitionist perspective in scholarship and organizing may tell us that, if the 1990s are nowhere near finally over, then perhaps we are at least starting to see cracks in the reproduction of some of their most toxic legacies. In this special issue we ask what might yet be learned from 1990s queer politics, as well as from social movements primarily addressing questions of race, class, migration, empire, or patriarchy in which queer and trans people played an outsize role? As HIV/AIDS prison activist Crystal Mason states in a roundtable discussion in this issue, although early 1990s political radicalization “fell off the edge” when Bill Clinton was elected, early HIV/AIDS activism sowed the seeds of the current prison abolition movement by paying attention to the lives of incarcerated people.

Queer Scholarship

Contemporary reassessments of the 1990s have also turned to the key theories and preoccupations of queer studies itself. Shannon Winnubst has invited queer studies to ask whether Judith Butler's classic Gender Trouble might also be read as “a playbook of neoliberal celebrations and incitements toward nonconformity.”⁸ And Kadji Amin provocatively argues that “the future of the field of Queer Studies—as well as its relevance for scholarship on prior historical periods, racialized populations, and areas outside the United States—requires a reckoning with the field's affective haunting by the inaugural moment of the U.S. 1990s.”⁹ Amin calls for a queer studies that grapples with the histories and complicities that haunt its peculiar ideals and that de-idealizes its objects—including exceptionality, negativity, futurity, and coalition—without discarding them.

In sympathy with Winnubst and Amin, this issue includes examinations of the formative moments and origin stories of the field, both for the ways that the present moment can reframe foundational publications and events and for what the field's affective investments in this earlier moment might reveal or obscure. This special issue considers the convergences, parallels, and tensions between queer scholarship as it emerged and named itself in the U.S. 1990s and through scholarly and political formations in other disciplinary and global sites. The longer articles in this special issue reveal the ongoing influence of the United States as an inaugural site of queer studies, as they all examine U.S.-based sites and figures. At the same time, the voices and methods of the articles strongly reflect the influences of feminist and queer scholarship from the 1990s that challenge positivism and encourage reflexive consideration of researchers’ positionalities. Scholars’ affective investments often become ways to grapple with the asymmetries of the period in which an incitement to nonconformity often took the form of displacement and silencing. Thus, an understanding of 1990s queer politics and culture requires queer scholarship that includes self-reflexive methodologies. Accounts of 1990s political activism and culture in this issue take the form of oral histories, archival research, autoethnography, love letters, and conversations between comrades from the 1990s and across generations and reveal that political consciousness and activism were often inseparable from personal relationships and cultural formations. For example, Svati Shah and Patti Duncan recall the rich ecosystem of queer Asian American community-building and organizing in the Southern United States in the 1990s, narrating the ways that their movements were built on shared cultural identifications while not being culturalist. Their conversation helps to tease out the many ways that emerging forms of personal and cultural identification functioned to articulate a communal political project even as these identifications were also crucial in marking a queer space of play, desire, art-making, and friendship. Contributions by Karen Jaime, Pablo Alvarez, and Mary C. Foltz; the conversations between queer AAPI activists James Huỳnh, Sophanarot Sam, Eric C. Wat, and Sammie Ablaza Wills; and between Emily K. Hobson and AIDS prison activists Linda Evans, Judy Greenspan, and Crystal Mason all feature cross-generational forms of community, influence, and homage.

Queer Cultures

The 1990s were marked by “culture wars” on several fronts in the United States, from right-wing legislators’ attempts to defund the arts by scapegoating queer, of color, and HIV-positive artists to the dramatically divided critical reception of the 1993 “identity politics” Whitney Biennial. While the insights of critical race theory and the legacies of earlier political movements were radically reshaping the visions of cultural institutions and the artists they supported, the backlash intersected with a systematic attack against affirmative action, immigrants, and public arts and education funding that became the staple of a right-wing political agenda in the next century.

At the same time, the legacy of artists and cultural workers from that period such as Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and Félix González-Torres have had an undeniable impact on art and culture today, whether that influence is explicitly recognized or calls out to be excavated and honored. Contributions in this special issue give new attention to artists and cultural figures from the 1990s like writer Gil Cuadros, photographer Laura Aguilar, and drag performer and Stonewall participant Stormie DeLarverie. As contributors trace various global circuits of culture through their own personal histories and those of influential artists and institutions, they make a case that music, art, and fashion provide alternate and, in some cases, more capacious boundaries for identification and political consciousness than national or regional ones, particularly when thinking about the development of the internet as a nascent site of information, fandom, and community-building. For example, Serubiri Moses chronicles the importance of U.S. hip hop music and culture on his own self-fashioning in 1990s Uganda together with Jamaican dance hall as a musical and cultural form that became particularly African for the generation growing up after the end of South African apartheid. And Catherine Baker traces the ways that the Eurovision Song Contest structured an understanding of queer “European” citizenship, beyond the European Union, through the wins of queer and trans singers from Iceland and Israel.

Queer Space

As Olivia Laing reminds us in her introduction to the book Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories, queer spaces are made by queer people because “queerness requires an ecosystem to flourish.”¹⁰ At the same time, Hanhardt's book Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence charts the ways that middle-class queer “safe spaces” have historically served to gentrify and displace low-income (sometimes queer) residents and endanger them through privatization and police mobilization.¹¹ Taken together, the contributions in this special issue explore some of the paradoxes of queer spaces as they emerged within the changing political borders, affiliations and ideologies of the 1990s. As noted above, despite their shared aim to highlight histories, regions, and narratives beyond the Global North and metropolitan centers of queer life in the 1990s, the longer academic articles in this special issue are all U.S.-based, a fact that speaks to the ongoing dominance of the United States within queer scholarship. As a result, we made the decision to reverse the usual order of journal sections, beginning with the Forum section, followed by the Queer Conversations, and ending with the articles.

Although these sections do not begin to offer a comprehensive view of global queer life and politics in the 1990s, we invite readers to begin their reading of this special issue in this order as a way of framing the conversation through alternative maps of influence and travel that, if not provincializing the United States and Western Europe, at least highlight the ways that concepts of queer center and margin, East and West, and North and South took on different valences within diverse global contexts. For example, in the conversation among scholars Hadley Renkin, Kateřina Kolářová, Bogdan Popa, and Eszter Timár on “Queer Pasts and Queerer Presents: the Queer 1990s and their Legacies in Eastern Europe,” the participants stress the importance of “the West” to post-Soviet Eastern European concepts of queer life, even as more regional figurations of East and West structured things like access to commodities and media. In a humorous mapping of the “non-West West,” Kolářová notes that, for Czechoslovakia, Hungary was the West, whereas Timár notes that for Hungary, it was Yugoslavia. Other Forum contributions focus on queer life in places like Trondheim, Norway; the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania; and Atlanta, Georgia, all of which are considered both as sites in which queer community was built through art and activism and as nodes in larger global circuits with connections to Italy, Poland, the UK, Germany, India, and Korea.

Contributions

In “Red as Red: Conditions of Self-Fashioning,” Serubiri Moses opens the Queer Forums section by revisiting his own musical and sartorial self-fashioning as refracted through the 1990s in Kampala, Uganda. Moses traces his music and fashion tastes as they developed within a series of nested local spaces such as social mixers or “soshes” at his rural boarding school, his village outside of Kampala, where the behavior of youth were policed by Pentecostal elders, or the Mandela National Stadium, where Moses attended a concert by South African reggae artist Lucky Dube in 1995. These local spaces are in turn given meaning through the larger national developments in Uganda as well as the African continent more broadly, with Jamaican reggae and dance hall as musical modes refashioned to express a postapartheid pan-African unity. At the same time, Moses describes adopting the hip hop fashion styles of U.S. artists like Aaliyah and Destiny's Child and Jamaican artists like Red Rat as an expression of the unique attitude of dancehall culture that captured both its global convergences and its local particularities.

In “Queer and Asian in the American South: Mid-1990s Diary,” Patti Duncan and Svati Shah revisit their time as graduate students and activists in Atlanta, particularly through their connection to APLBN, the Asian Pacific Lesbian Bisexual Network, and the “analog” forms of community and organizing through which they negotiated their identities as “queer and Asian.” Although the temporal distance from this time makes visible the ways that queer politics and discourse have changed to recognize, for example, queer, trans, or nonbinary gender categories, or an awareness of Asian settler histories, these “spaces of struggle” and “spaces of joy” were formative in developing an intersectional vision of queer API community. As Shah writes about the many queer API networks that were developing during the 1990s: “They were spaces where we all learned more about the capaciousness of a term like ‘API,’ not to mention the vast diversity of caste, class, region, language, religion, and politics encompassed within the moniker of ‘South Asian.’” At the same time, their conversation sheds light on the myriad ways that place inflects political consciousness. Their account of developing a politicized API consciousness in the context of the American South through an awareness of the region's particular histories of racial violence and freedom struggles, a consciousness that inflects their later travels to places like New York, India, and Korea, reframes traditional diasporic origin stories.

In “Queer Choirs, Archives of the Self, and Finding Voice in the Refuge of the 1990s,” Thomas R. Hilder narrates his musical biography through the pop music of his childhood to his research on and performances with queer choirs in various European cities. Echoing the circularity of memory, this article travels in recursive loops through time and space, moving between Italy, England, Norway, Poland, and Germany, and using music as a channel through which to navigate between the isolation of childhood bullying, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 and the transcendent joy afforded by queer bodies performing in polyphonic community on a public stage. Describing a rendition of Radiohead's 1992 song “Creep” performed in 2017 by the London-based choir, the Pink Singers, Hilder writes that “the performance demanded not pity, but rather, through assuming an abject, perhaps perverse identity, powerfully punched back at a queer-phobic society.” For Hilder, revisiting this performance is typically ambivalent, providing both memories of internalized homophobia as well as pathways toward liberation and healing.

In “When Eurovision Came Out: LGBTQ+ Visibility and the Eurovision Song Contest in the ‘Queer 1990s,’” Catherine Baker concludes the Queer Forums in a contribution that traces the movement of queerness from closeted background to visible foreground in the Eurovision Song Contest as a television event that helped to mediate overlapping and competing maps of “Europe” as shifting geographical, political, and ideological formations. Including the countries of the newly formalized European Union, but also Australia, and extending further north and east, Eurovision exemplified global changes in gay and lesbian rights and visibility in the 1990s as a result of Western European NGO pressure on the EU. Baker writes that “‘Europe’ was both a symbolic and institutional container for those changes, though the examples of Iceland and Israel show this imagined ‘Europe’ extended well beyond the EU.” The first openly queer winners of the Eurovision contest coincided with the emergence of internet technology, which created spaces for Eurovision fandom, including queer fandom, to develop and to mediate between local LGBTQ+ experiences and broader transnational developments in legal reforms and activism. The queer publicity of Eurovision winners from Iceland and Israel supported the case for these non-EU countries’ symbolic membership in the Western European formation through their shared “European values” even as the novelty of these wins illuminates the tensions inherent within 1990s queer visibility and politics. As Baker notes, the 1998 win of transgender singer Dana International representing Israel reveals a “knot of contentions” within Israel that included responses of gay pride and religious condemnation over her public persona as well as the government's mobilization of her win to support a “pinkwashing” public relations strategy that markets Israel as an advanced, queer-friendly country and deflects criticism of its repression of Palestine.

In the first of three Queer Conversations, “Caring Across Generations: Queer Legacies in Organizing” stages a cross-generational conversation between four queer AAPI activists, James Huỳnh, Sophanarot Sam, Eric C. Wat, and Sammie Ablaza Wills, that traces the personal and cultural forces that moved them into activism, the importance of recognizing and healing trauma—whether the impact of HIV/AIDS or family experiences of genocide—and the power of storytelling for collective healing and community building. Although the conversation was organized around intergenerational community, the theme of intergenerational conflict emerged as a recurrent dynamic in contemporary queer AAPI organizing, exemplified by the resistance of some elders to understand or respect nonbinary pronoun choices. The panelists discussed this conflict both in terms of the need for members of marginalized communities to recognize the changing nature of those margins—those who have fought for recognition need to stay conscious of the ways they may now occupy a center that marginalizes others—as well as in terms of acknowledging this stubbornness and resistance as being potentially connected to other survival mechanisms. As Wills states: “That's why I love queer organizing so much. That's something that I hear across our stories, that when we were allowed that space, when we claimed that space, when we co-created it with other people, queerness was not just a singular personal identity choice. It's a lineage, it's a process, it's an action of how we then move forward with our histories in hand.”

In “Organizing against AIDS and across Prison Walls: A Roundtable Interview with Linda Evans, Judy Greenspan, and Crystal Mason,” Emily K. Hobson gathers AIDS prison activists who were organizing both inside and outside of prison in the 1990s. Evans co-founded Pleasanton AIDS Counseling and Education (PLACE) while incarcerated in federal prison. Both Greenspan and Mason were members of ACT UP San Francisco. Greenspan worked for the National Prison Project of the ACLU and founded the HIV/AIDS in Prison Project, and Mason worked with incarcerated or newly released people living with HIV/AIDS at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. The conversation covers their experiences with prison organizing, including Evans's accounts of the stigma and isolation experienced by women with HIV/AIDS in jails and prisons and the formation of groups by incarcerated women to educate and support each other in the face of institutional indifference or hostility. As Evans notes, this organizing, when extended to people's lives postincarceration, has had a significant effect in making formerly incarcerated people more visible and respected as central to an abolitionist politics. She says, “I do think that one of the achievements of our efforts to build a movement of formerly incarcerated people is that the life experience of people who have been in prison is becoming more valued. . . . It takes people who have been directly impacted to take down the structural barriers set in place. I truly believe that the people who have been closest to the problem are closest to the solution.” Although Mason notes that the issues of HIV/AIDS and prison activism were dealt a blow with the introduction of antiretroviral drugs and the centering of gay marriage and military service, she acknowledges the ongoing impact of this early work, saying, “It feels to me that during the 1990s, with HIV and AIDS, there began to be more talk and understanding about the lives of people involved in the carceral system. That opened the door for words like abolition to become part of the lexicon.”

In “Queer Pasts and Queerer Presents: The Queer 1990s and their Legacies in Eastern Europe,” the issue's final Queer Conversation, Hadley Renkin, Kateřina Kolářová, Bogdan Popa, and Eszter Timár share their queer memories of 1990s postsocialist Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, circumambulating questions of queer and proto-queer politics, communities, and representations within media and film, including pornography. This fascinating discussion cannot be captured in a brief summary, but one observation by Renkin comes close to bringing together many of the threads when he draws out the unifying theme of ambivalence, which appears, for example, in Kolářová’s discussion of the way that, even within larger misogynistic and homophobic public spaces, the Czech Ministry of Health supported lesbian and gay publications and activism “because they were trying to keep women from overuse, or abuse, of nicotine and smoking, or from alcoholism” and “because of HIV/AIDS—because it was seen as something that concerns us all. So, there was a short period of time in which sexuality became a public issue.” Renkin elaborates on this ambivalence, reflecting that “part of what was queer about the ’90s, at least in postsocialist Eastern Europe/Central Eastern Europe, was that it was a very queer situation in general—that there were all of these borders crossings of expected categories: between the ’80s and the ’90s, between the State and everyday life or the public sphere, between popular culture and high literature/art, between violence and self-knowledge. It's a really queer moment.” As unified Western notions of gay identity with its attendant associations with liberal multiculturalism and private property became ascendant, this more inchoate sense of queerness as ambivalence and border-crossing at various internal and external scales began to recede. This document deserves repeated reading to capture the layers of complexity, irony, and humor through which these histories are recounted and parsed.

In “‘To Mystify, Terrify, and Enchant’: Queer Nation and the Historiography of Queer Politics,” Christina B. Hanhardt opens the issue's five longer-form articles by arguing that despite the volumes dedicated to debates about the meaning of both terms in the construction “queer theory,” there has been little attention paid to the history of queer politics, and a consideration not only of the meaning of queer but also of “politics and how the definition of the latter might also relate to practices of scholarly inquiry.” Attending to the history and historiography of queer politics requires a move away from the approaches of literature and critical theory, disciplines within which queer theory became enshrined, toward academic fields and questions “far afield from what many label queer or theory to be.” To do this, Hanhardt undertakes a study of Queer Nation, the organization most associated with both the name queer and its political methods and ideologies. Drawing on a rich archive of sources (from the New York, and to a lesser extent, San Francisco QN chapters), Hanhardt finds that the strategies and meanings of queer politics were being debated from the beginning. Many of these questions echo in the debates around normativity that shape current evaluations of queer theory and its legacies, debates that often take the form of a closed loop in which normativity and antinormativity represent opposite sides of the same liberal coin that presume and privilege a choice between claiming or rejecting a queer identity, “or between a desire to transgress and reject social norms versus a demand to be included in social norms by transgressing normative strategies of political propriety.” As these debates were occurring within the queer movement, Hanhardt traces the parallel theorizing being done by feminists of color that examined questions of deviancy and antinormativity not solely through a lens of personal choice and stylized resistance but through a myriad of social and political factors that inflect and constrain individual choices within larger systems of power. Represented most powerfully by Cathy J. Cohen's 1997 article, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,”¹² this work can be found more frequently in the social sciences and often does not center queer-defined actors or activism. As Hanhardt writes, “Queer, here, is not an identity nor a transgressive strategy, but an interpretive framework for understanding matrices of power.” This alternative genealogy not only suggests a reorientation of the field of queer studies away from its own terms, but it also highlights a rich history of scholarly work that has always eschewed debates about normativity versus antinormativity “in favor of tracing how norms are made, enforced, and negotiated.”

In “Gaga for MAGA: Nineties Nostalgia and Gay Reactionary Populism,” Francesca Petronio studies the gay conservative WalkAway movement, which urges gay and trans people to “walk away” from the Democratic party. Based on analysis of the movement's website and video testimonials as well as ethnographic research at one of the group's town hall meetings, Petronio argues that the group and its charismatic leaders draw their affective force from key 1990s tropes, namely LGBT coming-out narratives and battles over biological determinism versus social construction. Through their MAGA-like calls to the past, the rhetoric and media strategies of the group use nostalgia to mobilize a vision of the gay 1990s in which the fight for marriage equality and LGBT rights (predicated upon the affirmation of biologically determined binary gender categories) constituted the end-goal of gay activism. Led by gay and trans figures, the group represents one of the ways that “postgay” politics are being deployed by the right-wing to metabolize the language and strategies of queer political activism for its own homophobic and antitrans ends.

Although different in focus and style, the last three articles in this issue can be characterized as love letters, accounts of affection and appreciation for legacies left by queer elders for the next generation. “Queer Activism in the Queen City: Vignettes about 1990s LGBTQ+ Organizing in a Small Urban Center of Eastern Pennsylvania” by Mary C. Foltz takes expressly epistolary form, as a series of letters informed by oral histories collected through the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. Making the case for the importance of regional and community archives that collect and preserve LGBTQ+ histories beyond the better-known urban centers, Foltz's letters to LGBTQ+ elders thank them and chronicle accomplishments that both undergird contemporary LGBTQ+ life in the region and remain vulnerable to erasure and reversal: establishing the Lehigh Valley Pride festival; providing locally focused AIDS education and services; organizing voter guides and mobilization against 1990s antigay legislation that proved influential in the battleground state; founding LGBTQ+ publications; and providing LGBTQ+ leadership and activism in unlikely sites like the Allentown Puerto Rican Day Parade and the Mennonite Church. The article provides a sample of the rich materials stored in this community archive as well as a testament to the importance of public history for the construction of place and community memory.

In “Laura Aguilar and Gil Cuadros: Legacies of 1990s Los Angeles Chicanx Resistance Through Illness and Queer Friendship,” Pablo Alvarez adds new layers of insight into the rich legacy of the late photographer Laura Aguilar, paying particular attention to her lesser-known photographic work as well as her friendship with writer Gil Cuadros. Taking place over the course of his ten-year friendship with Aguilar, Alvarez's research is the result of a methodology of care, in which Aguilar shared her home archive and life story while Alvarez helped to tend to her home, garden, and increasingly ill body. Alvarez argues that this tender collaboration grounded in the quotidian is a necessary method for being able to perceive what he calls a “Chicanx AIDS consciousness”—the particular reverberations that AIDS left in Chicanx communities as well as how it is seen and remembered. Centering the framework of friendship and community (including its painful ruptures and failures) allows Alvarez to recognize the centrality of AIDS and AIDS activism in Aguilar's work, despite her protestations that she was not an activist.

Finally, in “‘It Ain't Easy Being Green’: Race and Time in Stormé DeLarverie's Butch Swagger and Presence,” Karen Jaime examines the self-presentation of drag performer, Stonewall combatant, and legendary dyke bar bouncer Stormé DeLarverie, whose particular butch swagger Jaime analyzes through film and photographic portraits by Michelle Parkerson, Lisa Graziano, and Avery Willard, as well as through personal memories of DeLarverie from Samuel Delany and Jaime herself. Jaime's reading of DeLarverie's assertive and distinctive “butch look rooted in lesbian bar culture, East Coast urbanity, and Black gender styles” responds to one of the discursive legacies of the 1990s Sex Wars, which positions butch lesbian identity as out of time: either an artifact of an outdated, binary view of gender or a relic of gendered formations on the verge of extinction. Following DeLarverie's self-fashioning from the segregated South to pre- and post-Stonewall queer New York, Jaime makes a case for understanding butch lesbian, in particular Black butch lesbian, style as enacting historical continuities across queer space and time through its insistence on agency, resistance, and pleasure.

Editing this special issue has taken us on a journey through temporal loops that are simultaneously inspiring and devastating. Working on any era whose legacies involve activist and scholarly communities assembled in response to mass displacement, debility, and death is both a sobering and encouraging reminder of the ways in which the people and questions of the past “refuse to settle,” in the words of Pablo Alvarez. One image from Alvarez's article for this special issue stands out. In a 1993 portrait by Laura Aguilar of her dear friend and comrade Gil Cuadros, two images of Cuadros stand side by side. In the first photograph, Cuadros wears a Palestinian keffiyeh draped over a denim jacket and striped shirt. In the second, he is naked except for his jewelry and glasses. Without Alvarez's guidance, it would be easy to miss the small ACT UP pin affixed to the keffiyeh. But this signifier, which Alvarez reads as one of many signs of the subtle yet pervasive AIDS activism within Aguilar's work, serves as both a grim foreshadowing of Cuadros's untimely death from the disease and as a testament to the richness of feminist and queer of color activist histories, which often capaciously encompass and enfold a dense web of solidarities across intersecting and unique liberation struggles, from the demand for universally accessible HIV treatment to the First Palestinian Intifada. At the time of this writing, Israel's latest and most brutal siege on Gaza that began on November 2, 2023, has killed over 32,000 people, and the toll is sure to be higher by the time of this issue's publication. This image reminds us that the 1990s represents only one moment within a larger historical continuum in which queer activists have linked struggles against government-sponsored genocides, whether in the form of Israeli occupation and siege of Palestine, or of the marginalization and neglect of people with HIV/AIDS. We offer this collection as one small testament to this ongoing work.

Figure 1.

View largeDownload slide

Laura Aguilar, Clothed/Unclothed #25, 1993, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016.

Figure 1.

View largeDownload slide

Laura Aguilar, Clothed/Unclothed #25, 1993, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016.

Close modal

Notes