My 1980s Gayboy Playlist

FORTHCOMING Winter 2026

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist centers on eight musical works that impacted the author’s sexual and musical awakening as a troubled gay adolescent, including pieces by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Alban Berg, Prince, Kurt Cobain, and Tom Petty. Preferring Alban Berg over Van Halen in the 1980s was a serious aberration in the small Midwestern town[…]

Desire/Love (2nd edn.)

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FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant in this volume. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern[…]

Ravish the Republic

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Published: 07/15/2015

In the 2011 book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, the artist Gregory Sholette posits that we are living in an era of surplus creative energies concentrated in a teeming archive of artists, the poor, the “unskilled” and the “economically invisible.” It is a potentially disruptive archive that capitalism can’t[…]

Crush

Published: 02/27/2014

In Crush, a stunning collection of erotic poems and queer meditations delineating Stockton’ and Gilson’s mutual crushing on each other, but also all of the ways in which, sweetly and also sadly, affection ameliorates the anguishes that, despite our deepest devotions, are never constant, Stockton and Gilson write, In Aranye Fradenburg’s words, Shakespeare’s sonnets describe[…]

Desire/Love

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Published: 12/05/2012

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what[…]