The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature
If there’s no single definition of what it means to be queer — a word whose meaning seems to shape-shift constantly, just like the culture around it — then there’s perhaps no consensus on what defines queer literature as a genre either.
Still, one thing many queer people share is that we first discovered ourselves on the page. Often furtively, we read novels or recited poems or watched plays that seemed not only to speak exclusively to us, but also showed us a way of speaking about ourselves to others.
But among those works we sought out in school libraries or online, which have been the most influential in making and furthering queer culture?
That was the question we posed to six writers — the essayist and novelist Roxane Gay, the playwright and educator James ljames, the playwright and actor Lisa Kron, the journalist and TV writer Thomas Page McBee, the novelist Neel Mukherjee and the fiction and nonfiction writer Edmund White — who gathered over Zoom in early May for the latest installment of our T 25 list.
