This chapter explores the traditional strategies for democratic defense developed in response to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century within the context of American political constraints and constitutional jurisprudence. Democracy is not naturally occurring. It demands the intentional commitment, and recommitment, to a shared future based on shared values. During periods of political polarization and economic stress, authoritarianism offers the illusion of unity through restrictive and exclusionary policies that promise a return to a “great mythic past.” The twentieth century democratic defense scholarship grappled with how to resist the appeal of the easy but dangerously costly answers offered by antidemocratic movements. Building on this democratic defense scholarship, this chapter recognizes the limitations of implementing intentionally antiauthoritarian safeguards within the American constitutional and political context. As an alternative, it proposes the development of a nonlinear, collaborative queer and trans liberation agenda and outlines a practice of queer transformative democratic resistance that is founded in principles of social movement theory.

This chapter examines intensifying state-led attacks on LGBTQ people and reproductive rights in the United States through the lens of patriarchal authoritarianism. It connects the rise of the worldwide anti-gender movement with the historic exploitation of preexisting patriarchal power disparities by fascist and authoritarian regimes. It exposes the retrenchment towards state control over reproductive, bodily, and sexual autonomy as a tangible marker of a nation’s transition towards patriarchal authoritarianism and a time-tested fascistic tool. Patriarchy can be wielded as a fascistic tool and help facilitate a slide into authoritarianism by expanding social control and narrowing acceptable expressions of individuality, dignity, and freedom. Patriarchy excludes women from the public sphere while also exerting control throughout the private sphere of the family. Patriarchal authoritarianism further reinscribes patriarchy by exerting state control over reproduction, sexuality, and the family. Restricting opportunities for women and narrowing avenues for gender and sexual expression support the consolidation of power by limiting individuality and nonconformity.

This chapter shifts addresses the advocacy agenda of the LGBTQ rights movement, specifically the pivotal role played by the US Supreme Court. In less than two decades, the Court recognized the right to engage in same-sex sex, mandated recognition of same-sex marriage, and interpreted Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include discrimination on the basis of transgender status and sexual orientation as prohibited forms of sex discrimination. These developments fundamentally altered the legal lives of LGBTQ people. However, systemic efforts to undermine the integrity of the courts threaten these victories and the lives built around them. This chapter concludes that the current dominant interpretive approach of the US Supreme Court, known as originalism, is overly restrictive and arguably an expression of restorative nostalgia that prevents the Court from fulfilling its duty as a constitutionally mandated check against tyranny. An independent judiciary can serve as a powerful bulwark against democratic decline; however, courts can also provide a powerful legal veneer for otherwise patently autocratic policies. Democracy scholars refer to this as autocratic legalism. The increasing specter of autocratic legalism in the Unites States threatens to diminish the role of the Court as a tool for democratic self-defense.

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 continues the discussion of the advocacy agenda of the LGBTQ rights movement by examining the development of the institution-based civil rights advocacy that came to define the movement during the Obama and Biden administrations. During this period, the LGBTQ rights movement secured a rapid expansion of LGBTQ rights through a combined campaign of impact litigation and congressional and administrative lobbying that was bolstered by public advocacy campaigns, corporate outreach, media buy-in, and public education. Although effective in the moment, this approach is highly dependent on functioning democratic institutions and ultimately produced gains that have been revealed to be all too temporal. This chapter critiques the constraints of civil rights advocacy in the age of neoliberalism and explains how institutional-based lobbying fundamentally narrowed the horizon of LGBTQ resistance from a potentially expansive and creative democratic project into to a competitive, rights-bound universe. It concludes that the queer and trans movements must embrace the work of democratic creation and transformation as part of a broader pro-democracy or democratic resistance movement.

The Introduction explains how queer and trans survival is inextricable bound to the future of American democracy. While acknowledging the flawed history of American democracy, it outlines the inherently liberatory values of our democratic system and the importance of democratic longevity, especially to queer and trans people. The Introduction examines the bellwethers of an authoritarian slide and explores that ways that queer and trans people are uniquely situated to help stop the slide and effect meaningful change as members of an expansive transformative, pro-democracy or democratic resistance movement. It cautions that although history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme, and our challenge is to learn from the gift of hindsight.

This chapter looks beyond traditional concepts of democratic defense and provides a framework for the queer and trans community to engage in the process of democratic creation within the broader pro-democracy and democratic resistance movements. It argues that the queer and trans experience with rejection, vulnerability, and collaborative survival has uniquely prepared us to navigate the unfolding American democratic crisis. It encourages LGBTQ people to embrace the powerful status of being an “outsider” in service to the larger democratic project. Rooted in feminist and queer theory, this chapter concludes that both our societally manufactured difference and our innate equal dignity and humanity can help us to see beyond the restrictive binary thinking of mainstream society. This chapter argues that pro-democracy movements must be fueled by a commitment to collaborative survival and mutual aid. It recognizes that the celebration of our authentic expression and humanity are radically pro-democratic actions, especially when faced with state mandated conformity.

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.

Explicitly queer elements arise in the earliest accounts of life in New Orleans and again over a hundred years later in the mid nineteenth century in the major Gothic novel of the city. A primary presence in the celebrated bohemian community in the French Quarter of the 1920s, queerness also figures centrally among the literary celebrities of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans in such icons as Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, John Rechy and William March, as well as in the literary heroes of recent times, Brad Richard and Joe Westmoreland. Beyond these high-culture leaders of the city’s queer literary legacy, there is also a substantial queer presence in recent popular genre writing associated with the city (fiction of a young-adult or romantic-comedy or horror-slasher sort), even as frightened bigots, bent on backlash, have risen to high government office and seek to ban such books from libraries and curricula.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ fraught engagement with queerness, colonialism, and nationalism across such key texts as Queer, The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch, and The Wild Boys. Drawing on Oliver Harris’ and Alex Wermer-Colan’s insights into Burroughs’ overidentification with imperial tropes, Carmody argues that Burroughs simultaneously critiques and reappropriates colonial discourse through a queer lens. Through grotesque, parodic routines, Burroughs exposes the libidinal underpinnings of American exceptionalism and neocolonialism. Carmody situates Burroughs’ postwar expatriate writing – especially in 1950s Tangier – as emblematic of a nostalgic yet radical vision for a postnational community, rooted in aesthetic freedom and sexual plurality. Highlighting the transformation from colonial critique to postcolonial fantasy, Carmody demonstrates how Burroughs reimagines the colony as a site of anarchic potential, rather than nationalist redemption. The chapter ultimately suggests that Burroughs’ literary project is less a political blueprint than an unstable, generative terrain where queer desire and imperial critique intersect.

This chapter describes the foundations for and the possibilities of implementing a Queer AZN CRT framework in social work practice. Queer AZN CRT is rooted in critical, feminist, queer, Indigenist and Pasifika theories, and explores the impacts of colonization, imperialism, and indigeneity within intersectional Asian experiences. Six proposed tenets for Queer AZN CRT are listed along with core considerations for social work practice: (1) Queer, brown Asianization; (2) challenging mainstream ideologies about Asians, Pacific Islanders, and QTPI/QTAAm; (3) global, decolonial perspectives; (4) reconstructive histories; (5) multidisciplinary story, practice, praxis, and voice; and (6) social justice perspective. Two narratives depict the application of Queer AZN CRT in social work practice, first in a clinical social work scenario, and then within a macro practice framework. Additional reflections regarding the implications for Queer AZN CRT in social work practice and education are discussed.

This chapter explores the rich history of LGBTQ+ writing in Los Angeles – and demonstrates how that literary history is inextricably bound up in a history of political activism. Edgar presents the history of queer LA literature as one that begins with the landmark ONE Inc. v. Olesen case of 1958. In this watershed struggle for free speech, the LA-based gay magazine ONE struck a blow of free speech and against the suppression of queer culture. The chapter positions ONE Inc. v. Olesen as the origin point in the story of queer literary LA, an arc that then stretches through such writers invested of such varying formal, stylistic, and political inclinations as John Rechy, Gore Vidal, Brett Easton Ellis, Eloise Klein Healy, Nina Revoyr, Gil Cuadros, and Michael Nava.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, artists of color began to gain prominence and squarely address the burden of recognition and the politics of representation over race and Britishness. Chapter 3 focuses on Maud Sulter and David Dabydeen, who highlight the Black presence in European and British art through the poetic genre of ekphrasis, or poems on visual art. In Sulter’s case, the Scottish Ghanaian lesbian artist conducts a series of “queer reframings” through her career-long preoccupation with Jeanne Duval, the common-law wife, “Black Venus,” and muse to Charles Baudelaire. In contrast, David Dabydeen takes on one of the most revered English artists in his long poem, Turner (Peepal Tree, 1995), which enters into conversation with Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On, commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840). Their ekphrastic experimentations pattern forms of Blackness and racialized being whose radical alterity become “beyond recognition,” to the point of becoming nearly inscrutable and unknown in aesthetic form.

Before 1970, media rarely addressed LGBTQ+ identity and only as a curiosity, disease, or deviation from heteronormativity, making visibility the biggest issue. The few 1960s films addressing queerness still displayed society’s intolerance. 1970s–1990s Hollywood occasionally produced queer-identified characters through straight viewpoints. There were alternatives: camp operated in gay subculture, and lesbian subculture flourished in feminist bars and events. A pivotal moment occurred when comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s 1997 sitcom Ellen depicted her coming out. However, after that media event, the show’s storytelling about her life as a lesbian led to its swift cancellation. DeGeneres then began a talk show dependent on her personal style of warmth, humor, likeability – basically, a non-threatening lesbian. Since Ellen, television regularly incorporates LGBTQ+ characters/plots due to television’s more fragmented, narrowly defined audience programming in cable channel proliferation and streaming services. Movies and cyberculture likewise more frequently adopt queer sensibilities.

This chapter argues that throughout his prose works, Wilde demonstrates ambivalence regarding the significance of fashion in relation to flesh, and this chapter traces that ambivalence through texts including The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Profundis, and “The Birthday of the Infanta.” Treating ugliness and beauty, monstrosity and martyrdom, this chapter demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s continued fascination with beautiful flesh that is betrayed as such flesh decays, rots, and becomes loose and baggy, like an ill-fitting garment. Wilde writes against the backdrop of eugenicist discourse, which proves a foil to his aesthetic project while simultaneously animating his response to criminal charges against him for gross indecency. But Wilde also looks to an earlier precedent to work out questions of flesh and fashion, particularly that of baroque painting and sculpture by artists such as Guido Reni and Gianlorenzo Bernini in their representations of the flesh of martyrs. The world remains unsure whether Wilde was a monster or a martyr; this chapter shows that Wilde himself shared those concerns.

This chapter examines representations of wedding attire in a popular, though now defunct, feminist wedding blog, A Practical Wedding. The analysis compares two genres: posts sponsored by apparel brands and posts contributed by people about their own weddings. I argue that the two genres underline two forms of feminist personhood. On one hand, we find the rhetoric of neoliberal individuation, whereby the role of clothing is to help wearers present their best selves, wholly unfettered by others and their expectations. On the contrary, wedding accounts authored by readers-turned-contributors outline a model of clothing that is networked and connects the wearer to others alive and dead. I argue that the cleavage between these two models of dressed selfhood maps on to divergent impulses – toward individualism and being-in-relation – in contemporary feminism. Ultimately, the model of “haunting” by others that is implied by first-person accounts of dressing for the wedding provides a model for thinking about the ghosting of neoliberal feminism by relational ethics.