This project assembles a subset of 20th century LGBT-identified authors – Christopher Isherwood, John Rechy, Audre Lorde, Harvey Fierstein, and Tony Kushner – and examines the influence of media technologies like the telephone, gramophone, radio, and television on the metaphors, logics, and forms of their literature. Queer engagement with the media emerges in these texts as an oppositional practice, as a way for queer subjects to articulate and play with their identities, to pursue sexual pleasure, and to imagine a better world. Each chapter advances a media materialist approach to literary analysis that draws on insights from the field of media archaeology, which seeks to uncover the aesthetic, cultural, and political resonances of the media. Through their detailed representations of media technologies and their related networks and procedures, these authors stress the ecological, bodily, and material consequences that undergird the production and use of a given medium – often to the detriment of marginalized queer populations the world over – at the same time as they gesture toward the liberatory possibilities of certain mediums.

Furthermore, in their dual role as cultural producer and archivist, these authors envision literature as a means to store and transmit their visions of social transformation and queer collectivity into the future. Their texts are best understood as dynamic media assemblages, or queer archives, capable of reinventing themselves into new models of storage and transmission in response to the contours of queer life. As a contribution to the archival turn in the humanities and social sciences, an additional aim of this study is to palpate the transhistorical and transmedial reverberations of the queer archive as a storytelling technology, as site where queer histories and identities are negotiated and sometimes consolidated, but never fully fixed.