Abstract
Abstract
This chapter analyzes the work of the San Francisco New Narrative writers from three angles: its roots in the gay counterculture and attempts to build a Gay Left; its building of community around Robert Glück’s workshops at the non-profit Small Press Traffic bookstore; and its response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the chapter seeks to restore New Narrative’s political context, including the ambitious 1981 Left Write Conference held at the Noe Valley ministry, which brought together writers from various communities to debate issues of poetry and politics, and Glück’s involvement with the first civil disobedience against AIDS. Drawing on the work of the writers addressed in the earlier chapters of this study—particularly Spicer, on whom Kevin Killian was concurrently writing a biography—such work enables us to chart changing conceptions of queer politics and poetics at a time of widespread death and historical change.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
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