Revolutionaries in Queer Theory

01

Paul B. Preciado

Preciado injected black-market testosterone daily while writing 'Testo Junkie,' using his own body as the laboratory. Philosophy as self-experiment: what happens when the theorist becomes the specimen?

02

Guy Hocquenghem

Hocquenghem's 1972 'Homosexual Desire' declared the anus — not the phallus — the true seat of revolutionary politics. He died of AIDS in 1988, at 41, unrecanted.

03

Monique Wittig

'Lesbians are not women' — Monique Wittig said it plainly in 1981 at the MLA conference, scandalizing the room. She meant: woman is a class, and lesbians have already defected.

04

Gayle Rubin

Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay 'Thinking Sex' placed consensual intergenerational sex on a 'charmed circle' diagram beside murder as objects of equal public hysteria. The map still burns.

05

Kathy Acker

Acker lifted pages of Dickens verbatim, inserted orgies and gang rapes, and called it literary theory. Arrested for obscenity in the UK in 1984; the charges were dropped.

06

Patrick Califia

Patrick Califia — trans man, SM practitioner, former nun — wrote 'Sapphistry' in 1980, the first frank lesbian sex manual, then spent decades arguing leather was politics, not pathology.

07

No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Edelman's 'No Future' commanded queers to stop campaigning for children's futures and instead embody the death drive. Published 2004 — the year of the first American same-sex marriages.

08

Gloria Anzaldúa

Anzaldúa theorized the US–Mexico border not as a line but a wound that produces a new consciousness — mestiza, queer, split-tongued. She wrote 'Borderlands' in 1987 in poverty, on a used typewriter.

09

The History of Sexuality

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' — three volumes published before AIDS killed him — argued the Victorian era didn't repress sex; it invented an entirely new way to talk, confess, and be made by it.

10

Michel Foucault

Foucault spent his last years cruising San Francisco bathhouses while dying of AIDS — a fact he reportedly knew. The man who said power invented sexuality lived the argument to its end.