The Gay 90s

Come with the queens as they travel back to a time of gay bookstores, queer anthems, and a boom in LGBT+ publishing: the gay 90s! 

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Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. 

Show Notes:

Check out Michael Nava's wonderful essay "Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing, Part II"

Learn more about Gendertrash zine

Read Melvin Dixon's essay "I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name." 

Read more about Texas Tech's limitations on studying gender and sexuality.

Sabah as-Sabah's work appears in many 90s anthologies, including In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers (1992; edited by Kevin Powell & Ras Baraka), Catch the Fire!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (1998), and The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (ed. Assotto Saint, 1991).  

Read Audre Lorde's "The Electric Slide Boogie" in The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance: 1987-1992.

Read Marilyn Hacker's "The Boy"

Justin Chin's "Cocksucker's Blues" is included in his first book of poems, Bite Hard (1997). Watch a tribute to Chin here. 

Here's the table of contents (with some hyperlinks) of The World in Us, edited by Elena Georgiou and Michael Lassell.

You can read Maureen Seaton's "Blonde Ambition" (and the entirety of Furious Cooking)

Read Dennis Cooper's "After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade"

Read Gerry Gomez Pearlberg's "Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette"

Some queer poets/poems we mention:

 Eileen Myles, "American Poem"

JD McClatchy, "My Mammogram"

David Trinidad

Rafael Campo, The Other Man Was Me

Eloise Klein Healy

Frank Paino, The Rapture of Matter

Paul Monette, 18 Elegies for Rog

Joan Larkin

Judy Grahn

Robin Becker

Maggie Anderson

Richard McCann, Ghost Letters

Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat

Chrystos

Cheryl Clarke