Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission
Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility
Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel
Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility

In Garth Greenwell’s critically celebrated gay novel What Belongs to You (2016), the first-person narrator, who grew up in the era of unpreventable and untreatable HIV, struggles to distinguish between sex and suicide in his early years, and as a result his most thrilling erotic experiences in later adult life are tinged by memories of dangerous abandon. Gay autobiography as elegy, What Belongs to You aestheticizes a nonnormative relationship to time that has been a primary focus of queer studies for nearly fifteen years, from Lee Edelman’s massively influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) to J. Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), and Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), to name only a prominent few. The four recent books visited briefly here aver...