ABSTRACT

There was a time when edited collections in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies did not devote entire chapters to capitalism. Those that did tend to reprint John D’Emilio’s field-defining “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” first published in 1983.1 As Steven Maynard notes, strictly materialist analyses like D’Emilio’s had fallen out of fashion by the time George Chauncey’s Gay New York helped to institutionalize gay social history as a widely read sub-field amongst Americanists.2 These days, with the history of capitalism an ever-more-popular topic, collections like these must respond to market demand by offering a materialist analysis of American sexuality. We have queers to thank for this development, and for more reasons than one. Queer scholarship, in and outside of the academy, has played a determining role in the humanities’ interest in neoliberalism or “late capitalism” as a site of cultural and historical inquiry. Outside of the academy, queer Marxist community organizers like Amber Hollibaugh, Kenyon Farrow, Ryan Conrad, and Queers for Economic Justice drew from their activist experience to deliver speeches and publish essays that opposed the explicit and implicit neoliberalization of LGBT politics.3 Inside the academy, students and scholars who were dissuaded by the not-so-subtle masculinism of David Harvey-style neo-Marxism turned to Lisa Duggan’s Twilight of Equality, and in doing so, helped usher the study of neoliberalism further into the academic mainstream. Just as importantly, by the mid 2010s, LGBT political movements had won expanded access to intergenerational property rights through marriage equality, thus confirming the accuracy of queer anti-capitalist critique. Indeed, as Alexandra Chasin illustrates in Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, no minoritarian political movement in the United States has so successfully merged their stated political interests with those of the consumer market economy.