This chapter addresses the deepening crisis of democratic decline and political instability in the United States. It charts the erosion of our longstanding democratic norms and institutions and explores the contours of foundational terms, such as authoritarianism, fascism, fascistic tools, and autocratic legalism. By examining the American experience in the broader global context of democratic backsliding, this chapter explains how attempts to consolidate power by imposing conformity and restricting individual rights can serve as an early warning signal of a fascistic rise. It asserts that the most recent attacks against LGBTQ people in the Unites States are part of a dangerous antidemocratic movement using scapegoating and demonization to stoke populist anger. Through this lens, the MAGA movement’s flagship policies of gender conformity and patriarchy are both a symptom of democratic decline and a fascistic tool that can be used to consolidate power. Although many Americans have only recently begun to come to terms the realities of our democratic decline, generations of queer and transgender people have spent their lifetimes navigating the fault lines of this unfolding crisis.

This chapter explores the use of restorative nostalgic political propaganda by antidemocratic forces to pursue a myth of a “golden age” and reinstate policies built on racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. Although conservative political figures in the US have long capitalized on the allure of restorative nostalgia to delegitimize progressive social and political reforms, today’s populist MAGA movement is different in both kind and degree. In a quest to “make America great again,” the MAGA movement aims to turn the clock back on decades of social justice gains by villainizing the social progress and expansion of rights that have made many of our lives possible. This chapter explains the historic use of restorative nostalgic propaganda by fascist regimes to blame modernity and the expansion of civil and political rights for the loss of a “great mythic past” defined by simplicity and prosperity. Under this view, individuals who advocate for progressive reforms are demonized and branded as enemies of the state. Restorative nostalgic political propaganda demands the exclusion and erasure of nonconforming individuals to restore the “simple life” and regain national glory.

Burroughs and the monstrous have always gone together, and this chapter examines how not only his work but Burroughs himself was from the start defined in terms of monstrosity. It traces the origins of the association back to his early critical reception and even earlier fictionalization as a profoundly sinister persona in the novels of Jack Kerouac. The specific grounds for identifying Burroughs or his work as monstrous have changed over time, often focusing on ambiguously misogynistic, racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic content, and on his identity as a homosexual and drug addict. His accidental shooting of his second wife, Joan Volmer, has cast the darkest shadow, but, this chapter argues, it has obscured the actual significance of monstrosity in Burroughs’ work. This, as critics such as Wermer-Colan and Stevenson have argued, lies in how he embraced complicity rather than hypocritically denied it, resulting in strategies that weaponize monstrosity as a mirror for the dark forces at work in the world.

The institutional terrain in which chaplains operated shifted in moral terms. Until the twenty-first century, the Army was overwhelmingly white, male, heterosexual, Christian and resistant to change. The RAChD did little to challenge that status quo or to combat the racism, sexism and homophobia that arose from it. If, with the same complaisance, it went on to adhere to an externally driven equality and diversity agenda, it had a lot more to say about the ethics of war. Significantly, its Journal aired debates over nuclear weapons and issues of war and peace with surprising freedom. Evidently, killing still raised strong ethical concerns in a professional culture informed by Christian morality and by the just war tradition, with its problematics exacerbated by a growing tangle of legal expectations and constraints. Despite imputations to the contrary, and especially in the complex and controversial counter-insurgency campaigns of the later twentieth century, there is scant evidence to justify the suspicion that unit chaplains, as military pastors, were simply predisposed to connive in the misconduct of soldiers and some clear indications that their influence was one of restraint.

This chapter explores why African queer fiction and theory is decontextualized and discussed as if it is devoid of a history and proposes a historicization and decolonization of its creativity, criticism, and theory. It foregrounds three questions: What is the theoretical texture of African queer theory and how does it appear in continental discursive practices? Who are the leading writers and critics of African queer fiction, and what are the recurrent leitmotifs in their fiction? How have the representations and/or criticism of African queer fiction evolved over the last sixty years? The answers to the foregoing questions affirm the evolution of depictions of African nonnormative sexualities in African literature from queer denialism to sexual rights activism that contests a singular African heterosexuality. The chapter concludes that African queer experiences in fiction and film have progressed from being deployed as metaphors of pathology, Western corruption, and imperial hypocrisy to humanized “coming-out” narratives in continental sexuality debates.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce moral panic about sexual and gender minorities, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity. It begins with the story of Frank Kameny, a White Jew and US veteran who lost his job as an astronomer during the Lavender Scare, a moral panic about gay men and lesbians working in the US government that started in the 1950s and led to their mass firing. Informed by intersectionality, this chapter connects that panic to the current assault on the rights of sexual and gender minorities or LGBTQIA2S+ persons, and discusses who they are, some popular myths about them, and what is sexuality and gender. They are pathologized, criminalized, and erased by heteronormativity, the notion that heterosexuality is the “normal” form of sexual orientation, and assuming the gender binary of men versus women, and cisnormativity, a system that favors cisgender people who identify with their gender assigned at birth and restricts gender expression. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on gender euphoria and trans joy, from affirmation to liberation. It ends with a discussion of Frank Kameny and how gay rights build on Black civil rights.

Sean O’Casey based himself in London between 1926 and 1938, and this chapter examines the cultural life of interwar London during O’Casey’s time there. London’s theatre world had long been an important destination for Irish playwrights, and this section of the book establishes the kind of expectations and tastes that O’Casey encountered when he arrived here from Dublin. The chapter explores O’Casey’s interaction with the English capital’s culture and society, and shows how the move to the English capital shaped O’Casey’s social views as well as the subject and form of his writing.

This chapter analyzes the regulation of sexual desire as one aspect of the process of progressive centralization through which the papacy affirmed its control over the Catholic Church and society across the centuries. While the accusation of homosexual behavior was increasingly associated with forms of religious and social nonconformity, the prohibition of homosexual intercourse became an instrument for encouraging ecclesiastics’ and lay people’s increasing examination of their individual consciences. The control of same-sex desire thus favored the internalization of a disciplinary attitude that hierarchically emanated from the center to the periphery. As a response to the increased visibility of sexual and gender minorities, nowadays the issue of same-sex marriage is demanding increased attention. The issue has never been discussed more thoroughly by popes as it has been in the last decades. Despite some significative epistemological shifts, however, the doctrinal approach towards this matter has remained strikingly consistent, and homosexuality is still condemned by the Catholic Church as a disordered inclination.

This chapter explores prejudice and discrimination and their effects on LGBTIQ people and communities. First, this chapter reviews research on attitudes towards LGBTIQ people, with reference to studies of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. With specific reference to hate crimes, it next discusses homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic victimisation. Systematic prejudice (structural prejudice embedded in social and legal institutions) is then discussed in relation to key constructs such as heterosexism, heteronormativity, and cisgenderism. The final section of the chapter focuses on minority stress and the ways in which this and other processes (e.g., internalised homophobia, decompensation) contribute to psychological distress among LGBTIQ people, including those who a multiply marginalised. The impacts of these factors on mental health in LGBTIQ populations are also discussed.

Chapter 5 explores the common stereotype that LGBTQ+ people flaunt their sexuality, or behave sexually inappropriate in ways that heterosexual and cisgender people do not. This stereotype undergirds the rationale for recent anti-LGBTQ+ bills such as Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill and anti-transgender legislation which is part of the backlash against the progress of queer rights in the early 2000s. Various shortcuts in thinking that contribute to the reckless and false belief that queer people flaunt their sexuality are discussed. Lesbian and gay parenting and children of queer parents is discussed as well. Heterosexual privilege is examined. The empirical work on child sexual abuse is also considered. The chapter concludes with strategies to reduce heterosexism and homophobia.

As we’ve seen, bitch has been used against men for almost as long as it’s been used against women. Bitch is still thrown at men and women alike, but it’s used somewhat differently. Bitch can have positive connotations when a woman reclaims it, but when aimed at a man, bitch is rarely a compliment. While a bitch can be a strong woman, it usually means a weak man. But unlike powerful women who are hit with the word, men are targeted with bitch when they are considered to be powerless. Bitch likens a woman to a man, while it likens a man to a woman. It’s an emasculating insult that suggests he’s lacking in courage and strength. Bitch might also accuse him of being effeminate or gay. There are many different versions of the slur for a man – he’s a little bitch, someone’s bitch, a prison bitch, or he’s a son of a bitch.

This chapter explores male homoerotic desire, whether idealised, romanticised, visualised or physically enacted. Male homoerotic practices and relations have sometimes been structured around notions of difference between two males who were thought to be respectively masculine and feminine, active and passive, free and slave, or older and younger. The last pairing was particularly important in classical European antiquity where it was, typically, regarded as compatible with heterosexual marriage and reproduction. This should alert us to the fact that many societies across the globe have not viewed male homoerotic relations according to the set of sexualised identities that emerged from nineteenth century western medical science, and which have since been contested by gay liberationists and queer activists. Western imperial practice has produced an abundance of evidence concerning the legal and religious regulation of ‘sodomy’. This invites comparison with records from other cultures which have often been, in their various ways, more positive in their attitudes to same-sex desire. The chapter, therefore, includes a consideration of globally diverse patterns of male homoerotic relations that acknowledges the complexity of cultural responses to same-sex desire.

Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure on stage as conductor, composer, pianist, and media persona, and off stage, too, in his physicality, sociality, charisma, and sensuous engagement with the world. His artistic and celebrity status granted wide berth to Bernstein’s ‘bohemian’ sexual and relationship practices, but he was not exempt from contemporary social expectations and anxieties. Indeed, Bernstein’s life and career illustrate the pivotal effects of twentieth-century sociosexual norms and homophobia on US musical modernism. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture. Bernstein’s life and career were fatefully shaped by prevailing social forms and mores, and ultimately his social and cultural influence would contribute to their reshaping.

This chapter studies the expression of queerness, gender and sexual identity, and diversity in comics and graphic novels. It identifies several stages in the history of the medium, from earlier coded or implicit representations of queer identities designed to circumvent the Comics Code Authority to increasingly and openly acknowledged visualizations of non-heteronormative subject matters in contemporary works. The chapter offers close readings of various coming-out narratives that use the graphic memoir form as a space for self-excavation and self-disclosure, drawing connections with a wider social of familial context (Howard Cruse, David Wojnarowicz, and especially Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home catapulted queer graphic novels into the mainstream). It also contrasts the “normalization” approach of mainstream publishers, who focus on diversity and support equality by featuring queer characters in ensemble casts, albeit at the risk of presenting a superficial image of queerness, and the more exclusive focus of alternative publishers and individually produced comics-zines, more centered on personal experiences.