Focusing on the centerpiece poem of Walt Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass – now a landmark work in the canon of gay literature – this chapter uncovers the paradox at the poem’s core: Seemingly obsessed with courting love and affection toward the poet (the flirtatious lyrical speaker is named “Walt”), it wishes ultimately to deflect such affective tokens not only away from the poet but away from any particular persons. Whitman, the chapter argues, understood conventional erotic love as intense and private but, precisely for those reasons, antidemocratic. He uses an autobiographical feint to transform his readers into indiscriminate lovers fit for democracy, lovers fit for the national orgy of the America we were all promised. His song begins with himself but gradually swells to encompass the entire demos. And, for any reader concluding the poem not having swelled with him, concluding still regarding the poem as autobiographical or a plea for individual love, his instructions are simple: “Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you” – which is to say, “You missed the point; read it again.”

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explore five works of gay literary autobiographical writing about the 1970s. These autobiographies by Michael Rumaker, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Essex Hemphill, and Bernard Cooper paint an ambivalent picture of the decade, a period in which the unprecedented rewards and celebratory tenor of sexual liberation did not merely erase the traumas of the past: homophobia, self-hatred, and abusive relationships. Most of these writers are quite different from one another; they belonged to different gay cultural scenes and lived and worked in different cities across the US. By identifying shared themes across their work, however, this chapter illuminates why the 1970s was a pivotal moment in the formation of gay literature as we know it.

Gay American autobiographical writing since the year 2000 became “post-gay,” where “gay” denotes a distinctive, unitary gay male cultural tradition. Post-gay means gay plus: the “post” signifies the movement toward an intersectional model of identity, where other dimensions of culture are integrated with sexuality, and sexual cultures – such as elite gay culture – are transformed by their intersection with black, brown, yellow, and other colors of the rainbow. The 1990s saw the explosive visibility of what was then called the “lesbigay” community in all areas of American public life. That tide ebbed during the second Bush administration, in the backlash against LGBT rights. But the cultural work progressed apace, becoming socially diversified. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the proliferation of gay US voices. Not simply de-pathologized, and not simply decriminalized, self-consciously gay autobiographical writing has multiplied into as many niche segments as the overall population. These include hyphenated queer Chicano authors, memoirs about drug addiction, and pre-Obergefell gay marriage chronicles, among other intersectional narratives.

The Mono Lake case was followed by a surge of interest across the nation in use of the public trust doctrine as a tool of environmental advocacy, and in some jurisdictions, a statement of environmental rights. This chapter reviews the ongoing development of the doctrine around the United States: the different forms of law through which it operates, the different resources it protects, different values vindicated, and even different legal theories about the nature of the doctrine itself. The variety reveals there is no such thing as “the American public trust doctrine,” only a tapestry of related implementations of the public trust principles at the core of the doctrine – the partnered state trustee obligations and corresponding public rights. The chapter also considers the contested intersection between the trust and federal law. While scholars debate the existence of a federal trust, the doctrine is increasingly recognized as a background principle of state property law for the purposes of takings litigation under the federal Fifth Amendment. In a little-known chapter of Supreme Court history, the justices negotiated not to address the role of the trust in takings litigation.

This chapter discusses the landmark Mono Lake litigation that finally reached the California Supreme Court, National Audubon Society vs. Superior Court – the case that turned the tide for the survival of Mono Lake, through public trust reasoning that would go on to foment a quiet revolution in environmental law. The chapter reviews the basic elements of the litigation, introducing the parties, their commanding legal avatars, and their overall positions before unpacking the specific arguments that made it to court. Then it highlights the most important doctrinal features of the landmark decision, including its affirmation that environmental values are protected by the public trust doctrine, its application of the doctrine to the upper reaches of the watershed, its assertion that public trust obligations extend over time, and its understanding of the legal nature of the doctrine itself. In casting the doctrine as a nonwaivable obligation to protect environmental values for future generations – a quasi-constitutional constraint on sovereign authority – the decision set the stage for its recognition as a tool of environmental law, and perhaps even a framework for environmental rights.

This chapter explores “trust-rights” climate litigation, claiming sovereign obligations to protect the atmosphere, public rights to climate stability, or both. It begins with scholarly consideration of these strategies, reviewing sources of environmental rights, application of public trust principles to climate, and critiques of the atmospheric trust. It reveals the hidden duality of trust-rights climate claims as a pairing of reciprocal rights and duties. Then it reviews the explosion of trust-rights climate advocacy around the world, including the conclusion in Urgenda Foundation v. Netherlands that the nation had failed its duty under the European Convention on Human Rights to limit contributions to climate change; the failed attempt in Juliana v. United States to partner an atmospheric trust claim with constitutional rights asserted under the Due Process Clause; and a new generation of advocacy to build trust-rights principles into U.S. state constitutions. Finally, it considers the arguments against – and in favor of – trust-rights advocacy, addressing both constitutional concerns about the separation of powers and practical concerns about bringing uncertain impact litigation.

The AIDS memoir has become one of the most common genres of gay men’s writing. American autobiographical accounts of AIDS can be found across a wide range of genres, including fictionalized versions in novels and poetry. There is considerable variety in these texts’ representations of the disease, yet, for all their variety, most AIDS autobiographies have in common the paradoxical fact that they are usually about another with AIDS rather than the writer’s own experience of AIDS. This is the case even when the writer is himself infected. The emphasis on care connects to the importance of community in both the gay male experience of AIDS and of literature.

Under Democratic control, with sugar and cotton no longer kings and limited public investment, a new generation of economically diminished but politically powerful planters and smallholders implemented Jim Crow in this majority Black region. Angola Penitentiary and convict leasing schemes, segregated public accommodations, minstrel shows, and lynchings recreated white supremacy. Sexual violence inflicted lasting harm and, when it resulted in childbirth, literally remade Black families. Virgil Harrell’s second wife, my great- great-grandmother Martha, experienced this kind of violation, one that led to the birth of my great-grandmother Ruth. African Americans had good reason to leave, but many chose to stay. They created families and communities that, while not always harmonious, offered sustenance and healing. People like Martha and Virge Harrell sought sanctuary in their families, communities, and institutions. Some accumulated property and joined regional and national networks. They reclaimed their vulnerable bodies in ecstatic worship in their own churches, in athletic competitions at the parish fair, and in the raunchy, jook-joint blues.

Chapter 2 reviews Plath’s metaphorical employment of the witch-martyr figure within the political and religious framework of the Cold War. The chapter outlines Plath’s subversion of the religious vocabulary and themes in her poems, like ‘Lady Lazarus’, particularly its draft, and her parallelling doctors and priests in short stories, such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ to critique the rhetoric of the Cold War. The chapter gives evidence that Plath employs the female body as a site of modern political and medical institutional violence, seeking inspiration from the power imbalance of the early modern witch trials and Joan of Arc’s martyrdom. The close examination of Plath’s drafts of ‘Fever 103°’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ concludes the chapter on Plath’s Cold War poetics. It argues that the anticlerical and anti-authoritarian language of her poetry reimagines witch prosecutions, martyrdom, and inquisition in periods of political torture and nuclear warfare.

Chapter 7 introduces the cultural and political context of post-war Britain in which the rise of English nationalism, immigration from the Commonwealth countries, Cold War anxieties, and the development of the Neo-Pagan Wicca religion contributed to the association of witchcraft with the dark other. The chapter reviews Plath’s short stories and poems written about a small English village community and beekeeping during the early 1960s, arguing that she engages with contemporary concerns of exclusionary politics and the racist and colonial rhetoric of witchcraft. Her bee metaphor interrogates the binary between self and otherness and ideas about magical and racialised power. The chapter concludes that in comparing the bees to diabolical flying women, Plath simultaneously challenges and reinforces the identification of the dark other with fearful magical power.