Andy Warhol sent Paul a Brillo box. Fran Lebowitz called Peter “a genius about sex”. The ending of Susan Sontag’s second novel was inspired by a bunch of Peter’s photographs. Sontag dedicated two books to Paul, and went to bed with him. The two men’s long list of admirers in the second half of the 20th century included Cy Twombly, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Alex Katz. The question, then, as with any once celebrated artist largely ignored by the history books – who were they, and what happened?

In this intimate and vibrant double biography, the author and critic Andrew Durbin reveals how the painter and sculptor Paul Thek and the photographer Peter Hujar slipped from the centre of the New York creative scene to obscurity. It begins in 1954 (a few years before they met as soul-searching twentysomethings) and ends in 1975 (a decade before they died of Aids). It tells the story of friends and lovers who, together, matured as artists and men; exceptionally talented, charming, sometimes cruel. They pushed the possibilities of what a gay relationship looked like – “open, and unapologetic” – and helped to define the New York art scene’s “cool”.

When we meet them, they’re seeing other people; only a quarter of the way through the book do they get together. No letters tell of how it happened, but Durbin, who’s also a novelist, niftily plugs the gaps of that fateful night in 1960: “the look in Peter’s eyes when he saw Paul at a bar on Washington Square, the way Thek minded whether Hujar laughed at his jokes, how Peter squeezed close when there was plenty of room on the couch”.

Durbin writes of bodies tilting towards each other and love making a person feel light. At times, it’s corny – boys kiss under “lavender skies” and dance until dawn. He’s at his best when describing the inner lives of his subjects, who were, in many ways, opposites: Hujar “dignified and remote”, Thek “cuddly and sensual”. While Hujar immersed himself in the gay scene, Thek occasionally fooled himself into thinking he should find a wife (in his notebooks he remarked that bisexuality was “BLAND”). Neither was interested in the cocktail circuit. “They cared more for integrity – for authenticity of vision – than to be wooed and feted,” writes Durbin. “They would sooner go hungry than compromise, and often did.”

Thek shot to stardom in the mid-1960s with his meat pieces, beeswax replicas of hunks of flesh housed in sculptural vitrines that appalled and amazed. That Brillo box Warhol sent him? He used it as packaging. If you only know one photograph by Hujar, it’s probably Orgasmic Man (1969), a closeup of a young man’s face as he climaxes, eyes squeezed shut, hand pressed to cheek, used as the cover art for Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life. At first, Hujar, who’d been drawn to photographing the people surrounding him since he was a boy, resisted homosexuality as a subject. By the 1960s he was regularly photographing his flings and friends naked. He photographed Thek masturbating on a mattress. He also turned the lens on himself, capturing his nude body mid-dance. In 1967, Thek made a replica of his own body, eyes closed, tongue poking out. Hujar photographed that too.

Early on, Durbin informs us that, unlike many stories of artists who died of Aids – which are often “read backward, through the lens of the disease” – this is the tale of Thek and Hujar’s lives before their deaths. Instead of presenting them as “tragic, twilight figures”, he offers a tender yet unflinching view of their choices, thoughts, feelings, what made them lovable, and what made them difficult to be with.

He isn’t the only one telling their story: a new book of photographs and letters was published last year; a biopic starring Ben Whishaw came out in January. History may have forgotten them, but there is always the possibility of revival. As Thek wrote in his notebook, “The tremendous event is still on the way!”

When it emerged that the National Trust had put vegan scones on the menu, it was seized on by some newspapers as a marmalade dropper – or strawberry jam dropper, perhaps – proof that the institution was woke. Wait until they hear about all the queer men and women who helped to make the Trust what it is today. The charity’s 5.4 million members and others visit its grand piles for a nice day out and a tea towel, unaware that they are surrounded by the ghosts of these figures. They are brought to life by Michael Hall, a former architecture editorof Country Life and author of books on Waddesdon Manor and the gothic revival in Britain.

Some of them, such as the buttoned-up Henry James, who lived at Lamb House, Rye, merely lent their lustre to properties that were later taken over by the trust. Others introduced features to the estates that continue to delight trippers to this day. They include Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, partners in a lavender marriage, who created the gardens at Sissinghurst, appropriately enough.

The National Trust was established in 1895, the year Oscar Wilde stood trial for gross indecency. Hall recreates the suffocating, hypocritical atmosphere of late 19th-century England; of London, in particular. But did hard-pressed queer Victorians create the National Trust? Not exactly. It’s true that one of its founders, Octavia Hill, lived with a woman. However, Wilde himself “had no direct link to the organisation” and one of Hill’s co-founders was a puritan who spent his declining years trying to stamp out saucy seaside postcards.

All the same, A Queer Inheritance tells a deeply researched and revealing story of our national life centred on a range of deceptively cosy settings. Hall suggests that Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray may have been inspired by outrageous goings-on at Clumber, the seat of the Duke of Newcastle, which is now in National Trust hands. EM Forster lived at Piney Copse in Surrey, also in the trust portfolio. He indulged in reveries about “the greenwood”, the semi-mythical woodlands of old Albion with revivifying powers, but also the habitat of Pan, master of pagan revels.

After the war, many country houses were passed to the trust because of dwindling returns from their estates and steepling inheritance tax. In their vast unheated rookeries, aristocrat’s fingers were turning the same colour as their noble blood. Architectural historian James Lees-Milne, whose diaries are a waspish insider account of the trust, had the job of tapping up the toffs to hand over their title deeds in return for staying on, rent free. He also dealt with what he called an almost “extinct generation of bien, high-to-middlebrow bachelors, endowed with money, privilege and nice houses and possessions; queers with an Edwardian sense of the proprieties, snobbish yet full of confidence”. Hall tells us the comic, sad stories of some of these squires, with their galleries of unabashed etchings and what Lees-Milne calls their “too immaculate blue suits”.

At times, the author is like one of the peelers of old London town, finding queer behaviour everywhere. The Arts and Crafts movement was characterised by “gruff male diffidence … [which] often concealed deeper longings; one of their most distinctive forms of furniture was the closet”. Two young men who passed as society beauties were clearly cross-dressers, but Hall speculates that they may have been trans. For a writer who appears to feel the sexual injustices of the past keenly, he makes little of the interest of some well-connected gentlemen in the company of boys. And while he strikes a retrospective blow on behalf of queer people, the elegant establishment pillars of the trust don’t so much as wobble. We only hear about the better class of gay and lesbian. This version of Downton Abbey doesn’t concern itself with life below stairs.

I make no apology for returning to the delicious scone served by the trust. Like the institution itself, it’s familiar and comforting but not free of complexity. Is it jam first, or cream? “S’gone” or “scoone”? Perhaps this is another case – like histories gay or straight – where there is more to the story than a simple binary suggests.

Given that novels are routinely touted as the new version of some previous chartbuster, Almost Life will doubtless be heralded as One Day meets Normal People for a sexually fluid generation. Featuring romantic indecisions spanning many years and an unironic take on the youthful psyche, it already reads as familiar.

The novel opens in Paris in 1978 with a moment of affinity on the steps of Sacré-Coeur when students Laure Boutin and Erica Parker first glimpse each other, and then teases the reader with more than 400 pages of will-they-won’t-they misunderstandings, ecstasies and sorrows. This is a tale of missed chances, of the choices we make, and of queer and bisexual love in different social climates.

With her “slightly terrifying aura”, uncompromising Parisian Laure “hadn’t expected to meet an angel on the basilica’s steps”. Erica, six years younger, gauche and beautiful, presents as the nervous English tourist she is. Supposedly straight, she is spending the summer in France before starting uni, whereas Laure is a queer seducer who treats her conquests with comparatively little emotion. Until Erica swings into view. Coup de foudre.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning children’s and historical novelist, and Paris in the late 1970s is rendered convincingly but at a length which, along with an abundance of drunken philosophical discourse, mars the pace. Erica is soon pulled into the boho-on-a-budget world of Laure and her intellectual friends, with all its art, literature, bar crawls and theorising. The two women are in love, although they manage to taint the ardour with classic youthful paranoia and over-interpretation. Laure is developing a problem with alcohol, and Erica is struggling with sexuality and self-doubt. Now, and ever after, she plays “versions of her life on fast forward, staying, not staying”.

Erica returns to Norfolk, and Laure loses her beloved best friend Michel to a disease that for a long time can’t be diagnosed as the Aids crisis hits. Bisexual Erica knows “she could not live how Laure and her friends lived, at the edges of things … loving Laure would not be simple”. Erica dates men and then a woman at UEA, and one of the novel’s longueurs begins, with inconsequential details and studenty conversations that would have benefited from a severe slash and burn.

The heart of Almost Life is the often thwarted love story between Laure and Erica, and all its joy and brilliant tension lies in the scenes between them rather than in the sections when their separate stories meander along at a maddeningly glacial pace while they write each other occasional letters. However, the obstacles to them being together are real and convincing, avoiding the navel-gazing vacillations of some contemporary sad girl lit.

One of the beauties of this novel is that both women are profoundly real and flawed, Erica with her sometimes egotistical selfishness and Laure with her addictions and inflexibility. Erica, who is “so tangled in her self-indulgent, stupid fantasies, her plots for revenge”, sometimes thinks she is “playing at lesbians with Laure”, and yet she knows in her heart that their love runs much deeper, at a time when homosexual and heterosexual lifestyles were largely incompatible. The path less travelled is not for Erica, and yet her mind never leaves it.

Having made their wavering choices, “this other truth existed, where she and Erica were. Had been, for all these years.” Despite one obvious queer character trope near the end, the novel does become increasingly propulsive: sensitive, sad, multilayered, and a moving examination of true love and passion. Millwood Hargrave’s first adult novel, The Mercies, was an instant bestseller in 2020. This updating of a theme looks all set to become a gen Z hit.

It would be hard to find a more courageous and perverse, iconic yet controversial figure in European literary history than George Sand. One of the great romantics, she helped transform culture, and her writing shifted social attitudes in ways we still benefit from. Victor Hugo called her “an immortal”; Gustave Flaubert, “one of the great figures of France”. Matthew Arnold said she was “the greatest spirit in our European world [since] Goethe”.

The 150th anniversary of her death this year is a chance to revisit her extraordinary achievements and legacy. But to do that we need to debunk some of the myths that surround this pioneering ecological, feminist and republican writer.

A prolific polymath, Sand published 70 novels, as well as travel writing, criticism, autobiography, political polemic and visionary essays on the interconnectedness of the natural world. She founded several politically progressive periodicals and became a highly successful playwright.

But none of it came easy. When she burst on to the Paris scene in 1831 at 27, writing for Le Figaro, she became immediately notorious as a woman in a man’s world. Contemporary gossip columns – like male critics ever since – portrayed her as both a man-hater and a man-eater. She was the cross-dressing, cigar-smoking divorcee Charles Baudelaire would label “a latrine”, and Friedrich Nietzsche “a dairy cow”. Yet, through pandemic, riots, typhoid, divorce and custody battles, bereavements and war, Sand never gave up on her vocation.

She makes it look so simple. Her writing is beautiful, expressive and easy to read. Yet her technique was radical. Emotional, idealistic writing about social injustice was something new. She wrote intimately, avoiding the panoramas of Balzac or Dickens. Her stories were full of detail about lived experience. And, starting with her bestselling 1832 debut Indiana, about the cruelty of arranged marriages, she placed women and children at the centre of their own stories.

That we now take this for granted is part of Sand’s legacy: the Brontë sisters, for example, imitated and admired her. A grandmother of fiction of social exclusion, in her 40s she turned her attention to the rural poor. Again she was ahead of her time, producing novels such as The Devil’s Pool, Little Fadette and François le Champi decades before Thomas Hardy explored Wessex.

Yet she was also just a convent girl from the provinces. She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil in 1804, to a Paris sex worker and an aristocratic cavalry officer. Her legitimacy – not to mention a life-changing inheritance – was secured by their shotgun marriage just a month before her birth. Her own marriage at 18, to an alcoholic boor, failed within a decade. They had two children; though one, her daughter, may have been the result of an affair.

When she left the family home in sleepy Indre for literary Paris it was with a lover, Jules Sandeau, with whom she co-wrote commercial fiction. But she didn’t abandon her children, and was eventually and most unusually awarded custody. She almost immediately outstripped Sandeau, but adapted his name into the nom de plume she would make famous. A male pen name was nothing unusual, as the Brontë “Bell brothers” and George Eliot would soon attest. But this one resembles a gleeful chopping down to size. “George” isn’t even a real French name, but a shortening of “Georges”.

Over the following years, Sand’s flamboyant promiscuity helped make her notorious. She was portrayed wearing men’s clothes, a habit she had picked up as a teenager in order to ride better. In Paris, this became a costume proclaiming her status as one of the literary “boys”, and enabling her to move freely around the city. But she wasn’t unusual: so many women were taking advantage of the freedom of movement crossdressing allowed that in 1800 the capital had issued a bylaw prohibiting it.

Sand also wore dresses, and her mostly heterosexual flings included a one-night stand with Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen (whose endowment she allegedly ridiculed), an affair with a leading actor, and a series of relationships with younger, financially dependent male partners. The adventures more or less stopped in 1838, when she became involved with the best known of these, Frédéric Chopin.

It was not a happy period. Their first year together included two months in an idyllic Carthusian monastery on Mallorca, where Sand had taken the pianist-composer for his health. Chopin would eventually die of tuberculosis: this stay became infamous because freak bad weather made him more unwell.

Tradition makes Sand the villain of this piece. In fact, for nine years she not only tended Chopin with care, working the traditional female domestic double shift; she also assumed financial responsibility so he could concentrate on composing. In this sense, his oeuvre from the Preludes onwards is another of her legacies. We now know from Sand’s letters how little Chopin desired her, and from his own how explicitly sexual his affection was for male friends.

Genius fascinates us by being made, not born, yet claiming to be the opposite. The additional obstacles women have historically overcome make their processes of self-invention particularly clear. But Sand isn’t just a history lesson. Everything that made her the pioneering exception in her lifetime makes her astonishingly relevant today. She simply refused to do what was expected of her. Storming the male bastions of literary Europe, she blazed a trail for future female artists from Elizabeth Gaskell to Louise Bourgeois to Taylor Swift. Her subversive adoption of the male writer’s uniform – from cigar and top hat to spats and riding coat – is brave and funny. It queers the notion of authority.

It’s also part of a shapeshifting refusal to be pigeonholed. Whether as the consummate professional turning in copy to editors who relied on her, or the loving grandmother tutoring two generations of her own family, she did it all. She campaigned for causes including an end to arranged marriage, the Revolutionary progressives of 1848, and the rights of a young rape victim with mental disabilities. She gave her earliest heroine, Indiana, global majority heritage. In the Val de Loire region of France where she grew up, and later helped the local poor, she was known as the Good Lady of Nohant.

Perhaps most remarkably, this pioneering feminist was also a pioneering ecologist. In her country novels, and in a series of essays written for Le Temps in 1871-2, she presented the natural world as something independent and interdependent, an insight prefiguring James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis a century later. Except that, typically, she personified nature as Corambé, a non-binary divinity of her own invention.

How on earth did Sand bring it all together? It took a fellow writer, her old friend Gustave Flaubert, to understand that it was her storytelling that integrated everything. At her funeral in 1876, he reported, celebrities and villagers mingled “up to our ankles in mud [and] a gentle rain”. This was, he points out, “like a chapter in one of her books”.

For one of Victorian literature’s most distinctive voices, who was once hailed as a genius by Oscar Wilde, very little has been known about Amy Levy for more than a century.

But audiences will now have the opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with a writer whose pioneering work explored women’s independence, Jewish identity and same-sex desire.

The University of Cambridge has announced it has acquired and for the first time unsealed Levy’s personal archive, including letters, draft manuscripts, photographs and diary entries. It is expected the material will inform a wealth of new scholarship on her life, work and mental health.

“It’s rare nowadays for a coherent corpus of a 19th-century author’s papers to come to light,” said John Wells, senior archivist at the Cambridge University Library. “We were determined to take the opportunity to make her archive available in the place where she studied and where she visited even in the last months of her life.”

Levy was born in 1861 into a middle-class Jewish family in London and entered Newnham College in 1879, becoming only the second Jewish woman among Cambridge’s first generation of female students.

She wrote three poetry collections, three novels – including Reuben Sachs and The Romance of a Shop – numerous essays and a series of articles for the Jewish Chronicle. When she died by suicide in 1889, aged 27, she was recognised by her contemporaries as an exceptional talent, with Wilde writing her obituary and commending the “sincerity, directness, and melancholy” of her work.

The newly available collection – which until now was owned by a private corporation – offers a vivid portrait of the intellectual and social circles that shaped Levy’s writing, from the early feminist New Woman movement to the cultural debates surrounding race science, art and identity in Victorian-era Britain.

Linda K Hughes, professor emerita of English and the Addie Levy professor of literature at Texas Christian University, who is working on a book project about Levy, said she believed the documents would not only transform academic study but also be of interest to a wider public.

“I read Amy’s poetry decades ago and they have haunted me ever since,” Hughes said. “Not only was she a fine and evocative writer, but she was also so complex. She affirmed her Jewish identity, but she was also an atheist. She seemed to get along very well with men, but she was a queer woman.”

Hughes said Levy had built a social network at Newnham and also in her later years, especially through Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget) “who was well connected to everybody including Wilde. Levy entered Lee’s circle, in fact she fell in love with her, a love that unfortunately was never returned.

“When Wilde received a one-page manuscript from Levy for his magazine the Woman’s World, he was bowled over by the story and called Levy a girl of genius.”

Researchers believe Levy’s work speaks directly to contemporary conversations around feminism, LGBTQ+ literature and Jewish identity and say she foreshadowed debate that would come long after her death.

“She was ahead of her time, which was perhaps one of the reasons she never entirely found her niche,” Hughes said. “She struggled with queer identity and how she fit into a heteronormative society. Marriage was not an option for her, but neither was having a career like a school teacher, which she abandoned to become a writer full-time.

“She has long been interesting to people who study Jewish women and their history. And today, when we have in the wake of the global pandemic so many young people struggling with depression, anxiety, troubled psyches, even suicidality, understanding her might be of interest and solace to a wider public too,” Hughes said.

The collection includes Levy’s 1889 appointment diary, in which increasingly sparse entries trace the last months before her death from inhaling carbon monoxide. A final, moving entry, written the day before she died, said: “Alone at home all day.” But Hughes said Levy in many ways had “a rich, full, exciting existence” too.

“She could be humorous at times, which shows in her writings. She did suffer from a trifecta of challenges, including neuralgia. She was growing increasingly deaf, which leads to social alienation and isolation. And she also suffered from depression.

“Though she never quite found happiness, it was always something she insisted on: the right to be happy, even ecstatic.”

Santiago de Chile, 1986, in the dying days of Pinochet’s dictatorship: the streets are flooded with teargas and littered with the remains of anti-government protests. The military is losing its grip on power, citizens are demanding information on the thousands who have been disappeared, and armed cells of communist revolutionaries are plotting to bring down the regime. Amid this turbulence we find the Queen of the Corner, a queer middle-aged former sex worker, embroidering linens for the wives of Chile’s army generals and singing along to corny ballads on the radio. (The cover blurb describes her as a trans woman, while the original 2001 US edition framed her as a drag queen, but the Chilean “travesti” identity of the 80s is culturally specific.)

She’s a marginalised figure, largely apolitical, living in a derelict building she has adorned “like a wedding cake” with paper garlands, and dreaming of love. By chance she meets a young man who claims to be a university student and asks if, since she has so much space, he can store books in her house, and maybe study there with his classmates. Charmed by his good looks and sophisticated manners, the Queen agrees, choosing not to see the reality of the situation; Carlos is using her home as a safe house, a base from which to plan Pinochet’s assassination.

First published in 2001, My Tender Matador is Pedro Lemebel’s only novel, a jewel in a colossal multimedia catalogue that spans live performance, essays and radio programmes. Far more than just an odd-couple romance, it is the story of love’s transformative, emboldening power, as well as a record of the bestial cruelty which the people of Chile fought against for 17 bloody years. It is not a maudlin book; frequently, it is hilarious, especially in the extended monologues of the first lady, who endlessly harangues Pinochet for refusing to take seriously the advice of her psychics and personal shoppers. It’s not that the people of Chile are unhappy with the government, she insists, “the problem is the grey color of your uniform … so dull, and it doesn’t go with anything”. Later, the Queen sizes up a friend: “But she was thick, Lupe was, that’s why she considered herself right-wing.” In such moments you can’t help but recognise the author peeping out cheekily from behind his characters, like a showgirl giving us a flash of leg from behind the curtain.

Indeed, the novel brims with illusion, masquerade and creative fabrication. When they picnic together as a cover for Carlos’s reconnaissance, the Queen directs the experience like a magazine shoot; when she throws him a birthday party, she invites all the neighbourhood children for hot chocolate and cake, just like they do in Cuba, the spiritual home of the communist revolution in Latin America. Carlos delights in the way the Queen beautifies “even the most insignificant moment”, creating a baroque universe from the crumbs of pure penury, a maximalist talent shared with the author himself. Certainly Lemebel’s playful ornamentation belies the fact that, as stylised as his work is, it is actually very lean. There are no unnecessary scenes and the florid atmosphere is perfectly balanced against a plot of genuine threat and tension. Passion informs brutality; action and reflection are held in graceful equilibrium, with crucial details stashed in the middle of unassuming sentences, and moments of humanity afforded even to Pinochet.

It is also deeply romantic. Though the Queen and Carlos know their affair can never come to anything, due both to the political climate and their discordant sexualities, nevertheless they give each other beauty, hope and courage amid the surrounding horrors. As such, Matador offers a study of resilience, showing how to not only survive the tyranny of stupid, vicious men, but to do so majestically – a timely gift.

The Australian classifications review board has been ordered to review its assessment of the book Gender Queer, after the federal court found the board had ignored, overlooked or misunderstood public submissions for it to be censored.

Last year, the Classification Review Board rejected calls to restrict access to a memoir about gender identity that was the target of conservative campaigns to have it banned in the US, and found the content was appropriate for its intended audience.

Rightwing activist Bernard Gaynor had applied to the board early last year to review the classification of the graphic novel-style memoir about gender identity by writer Maia Kobabe.

Complaints about the book – which details Kobabe’s experience coming out as non-binary – are focused on the cartoon images of sex scenes, one of which has been described by critics seeking a ban as “pornographic” and “paedophilic”.

After a review of the classification last year, including seeking comment from the public, the board kept the original classification as unrestricted, with the consumer advice of “M – not recommended for readers under 15 years”. Gaynor appealed against the ruling to the federal court.

Gaynor’s barrister, Bret Walker SC, argued there was a “broadbrush dismissal” of submissions the board claimed were anti-LGBTQ+. Walker said many of them objected to what they saw as depicting a man having sex with a minor – referring to an image portraying Plato’s Symposium.

Walker said many of those objections did not refer to the gender of the image’s subjects, just that it appeared to depict paedophilia.

In his ruling quashing the board’s decision on Monday, Justice Ian Jackman agreed with Walker’s argument.

“The fundamental flaw in that submission is that, as I have said above, the Review Board’s description of the public submissions overwhelmingly being ‘broadly anti-LGBTQIA+’ demonstrates that the review board ignored, overlooked or misunderstood those submissions,” he said.

“In light of that finding, the review board’s view that the submissions contained little or no evidence that the writers had read the publication, understood the content within the context of the publication, or failed to demonstrate engagement with the publication also proceed from, and are infected by, the review board having ignored, overlooked or misunderstood the submissions.”

Jackman said only 66 of the 576 submissions opposing the classification “can be rationally treated” as anti-LGBTQ, and that was not an overwhelming number as the board had said.

“Only about 11.5% of the public submissions by number, and less than 1% of the individuals who made submissions, can thus be described as ‘broadly anti-LGBTQIA+’ … The majority of the review board whose reasons were published in the decision cannot have read and understood the public submissions in expressing the view that they did.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Jackman ordered the previous classifications decision to be quashed, for the review board to reclassify the book, and for the government to pay Gaynor’s costs.

In the US, Gender Queer is one of the most challenged books in libraries. Kobabe told the ABC in May that the US push to ban the book had been frustrating and that the depiction of Plato’s Symposium had been included as it was the only gay-themed texts Kobabe had encountered in college.

Kobabe had said that the book would likely have been challenged even without the images that were the focus of this case.

“I think that the challenges are coming from a place of people just trying to limit queer, trans and non-binary voices in the public sphere,” Kobabe said.

“And I think the fact that my book has the title Gender Queer, I think the fact that it’s a comic, I think the fact that it’s won several major literary awards in the United States, and also that it is a happy story.

“It is a story of acceptance. It is a story of coming out. And in the story, I face no negative consequences to coming out.”

About the author

“Convincingly demonstrating the importance of Spain’s case study to the history of obscenity and pornography in the Western world, Javier Fernández-Galeano delivers a theoretically sophisticated, deeply researched, interdisciplinary study. This game-changing work is mandatory reading for all historians and literary and cultural scholars of non-normative sexualities.”

—Gema Pérez Sánchez, University of Miami

“Extraordinarily documented and wonderfully written, Queer Obscenity brings to light the archives resulting from the judicial persecution of queer pornography. This is undoubtedly a work destined to become a classic in the historiography of sexualities.”

—Francisco Vázquez-García, University of Cadiz (Spain)