issue ii: introduction to queer american literature

There is a lack of queer literature in English classrooms and the cannon of American Literature. Queer authors that are taught to literature students are veiled under the mask of heteronormativity. LGBTQ writers are homogenized into the dominant culture’s sexuality. Of course we know the staples or cult classics of a crucial part of our identity: Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Radcliff Hall’s Well of Loneliness, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman.
Last fall we asked ourselves, who else is there? Our actions came out of the frustration with the lack of visibility in the classroom; our analysis of inclusive texts led us to see the corrupt state of the literature field. This invisibility and coding of American Literature reminds us of the Hays code of production in film. People in positions of power dictate who is included in anthologies including the contents of their biography and work, they also which authors to teach, publish, and analyze.
This unbalanced power has led to a great bias as to what is considered and revered as American Literature (capital A, capital L, if we need to remind you). For example, many people critiquing Jane Rule’s The Desert of the Heart used their influence and moral codes to silence and devalue queer content and authorship. One critic wrote, “But all the time you keep turning to the photograph of the author on the jacket and wondering how such a nice looking woman could ever have chosen so distasteful a subject” (Rule 1). Even two decades later in the 1990’s Bertha Harris sees silencing taking place. Harris writes, “It is not the work per se we have lacked, but memory of the work that has gone before us: our literary past, and access to our literary present – which, by and large, is still being ignored or trivialized by the press. The most serious effects of this deliberately induced amnesia have been prevention of that measure of truth that only fiction and poetry can express and prevention of that sense of community all writers need in order to learn and grow” (Harris 258). Censoring part of the population’s self-image that demands all of us explore Literature as it is written for all of us and to leave with a greater understanding of humanity, not just within the context of our own lives.
After seeing the faults in American Literature, we decided to explore our invisible literature. Our first steps were deciding how we recognize queer literature. Should we classify authors identifying as straight who have queer content in this genre, and how about queer authors that have in their work only hetero relationships? Bonnie Zimmerman, a lesbian and literature theorist, suggests that we follow this outline: 1. queer author, 2. queer perspective, 3. expresses a queer perspective. After following this outline, we compiled a hefty reader of Queer Literature and theory. In this zine, you explore our views on the themes of Queer American Literature, an assessment of core queer authors, and suggested readings.