Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture: Bad Beatitudes

David Deutsch’s Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture makes a compelling case for the centrality of angelic figures and discourse in queer US literature, primarily by gay men, from the past century. Extending farther than his title suggests, his archive is bookended on one side by the Harlem Renaissance and on the other by Rabih Alameddine’s 2016 novel The Angel of History. Deutsch defines “bad beatitudes,” found across the varied works he analyzes, as “states of being that embody an unconventional grace obtained through reconceptualizing and even exalting, if frequently uncertainly or ambivalently so, conventionally degrading behaviors or identities, such as same-sex sex or nonconformist genders” (2). Because they are divine in human form, the angels in queer literature reconfigure the sacred and the profane and also work through other seeming dichotomies, including butch and femme, pleasure and pain, oppression and liberation, “the almost indissoluble tension between...