Kacen McCloskey

So much of it is about the aspects in queer culture that straight people fear, that straight society fears: strength and independence in women; vulnerability and intimacy in men; the upending of gender and family roles;

The scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton writes about how the queer child “grows sideways,” because queer life often defies the linear chronology of marriage and children. Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways, since their youth is likewise outside the model of the enshrined white child. But for myself, it is more accurate to say t

As poet Brandon Wint wrote in a much-quoted social media post several years ago, “Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.”

Queerness, I maintain in this book, has a temporal dimension—as anyone knows whose desire has been branded as “arrested development” or dismissed as “just a phase”—and, concomitantly and crucially, as I hope to show, temporal experiences can render you queer.

They insist that without an explicit historical record of their sexual encounters—diagrams, detailed descriptions of their conquests—to serve as undeniable proof, there’s no need to invent a queer history for them. Perhaps they had watched the same episode of Sex and the City that I had—“If you’re not going to eat pussy, you’re not a dyke”—to come