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This article, entitled "History, Nationalism, and Lesbian Cabaret: Agnieszka Weseli 'Furja' and Maria Konopnicka," traces the role that nineteenth-century Polish Positivist author Maria Konopnicka has played in the twenty-first century Polish LGBT rights movement, as well as the backlash against her newfound status as an LGBT icon from nationalist factions. More specifically, I examine how activist-historian and performance artist Agnieszka Weseli-Furja has reimagined nineteenth-century queer and feminist history through her performances as Konopnicka as part of the lesbian cabaret troupe Barbie Girls. Through my analysis of her sketches collectively titled "From the Album of Maria Konopnicka," I argue that Furja utilizes a form of feminist revisionist historiography to navigate the historical Konopnicka's ambiguous sexuality and her association with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish nationalism (often hostile to the LGBT community). Through these performances, Furja attempts to decouple patriarchy and heteronormativity from Polish national belonging, producing an alternative vision of Polish patriotism based in feminist community and same-sex desire.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piotr Domalewski's Operation Hyacinth (2021) centres on the young police officer Robert's (Tomasz Ziętek) investigations into a case of serial murder and his developing romance with the student Arek (Hubert Miłkowski). The connective tissue is that all of the victims are gay men and Arek plays a role in it. As the film unfolds, we learn, alongside Robert, that the case is a massive cover-up operation and that his discoveries marry together his private and his professional lives. In this interview, I discuss, with writer Marcin Ciastoń, his extensive research for the film, which was inspired by historical events; and Robert's and Arek's romance. We explore how, if on the one hand, Arek represents rebellion to Robert, then, on the other, Robert is the embodiment of reticence, and we attend to a key scene wherein Robert is pressured by his father (Marek Kalita), also a police officer, into questioning Arek about his sexual history. All of the characters appear to be on trial, and as Ciastoń declares, '[e]veryone involved had a secret'. This interview advances scholarship by recovering the critical project that directly informs this imaginative one, by suggesting its importance in LGBTQ history and by attending to Ciastoń's approach to personal and public histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the achievement of the gay American author Edmund White's numerous autobiographies and memoirs. After surveying the formal and thematic variety of White's individual life writings, it then questions why nearly all of them were written after the explosion of gay life writing that took place in the United States beginning in the 1970s, that is, after the periods of greatest struggle for homosexual emancipation and the fight against AIDS. The essay argues that White's non-fiction memoirs subtly re-configure the nature of the genre itself. Rather than explaining the narrator's sexual difference to an audience not entirely aware of homosexuality (as did much early gay life writing) or struggling to find a voice in a homophobic society (one of the great themes of White's autobiographical fictions), White's non-fictional autobiographies establish a self-assured voice that presumes the world can be usefully examined and explained by the individual gay subject. They situate the gay speaker at the centre rather than on the margins of American and Western culture. Using the form to understand the world from a gay perspective, White merges sociological analysis with traditional forms of life writing to create something new in the American gay canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural anxieties about their relationships. But, as notions of normative girlhood began to form, this intense scrutiny of their relationships had a significant impact on their everyday lives. The young women who were navigating this scientific and cultural shift developed a range of innovative strategies from subversively concealing their relationships to boldly pursuing their queer desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes gender non-conformity in late imperial Russia through a selection of newspaper articles on the lives of gender non-conforming individuals. It examines the potential motives for gender non-conformity and argues for including gender dysphoria as a reason why Russians chose to perform a gender that did not correspond to their assigned sex. The article explores these individuals' lives as well as their interaction with authority figures, the justice system, and Russian journalists and newspaper readers, to assess how late imperial Russians experienced and reacted to instances of public gender non-conformity. Finally, the article argues that gender non-conformity was a matter of great interest for the late imperial public but was treated leniently by figures in positions of power, from journalists who chose not to expose gender non-conforming Russian to judges who chose not to punish them for their defiance of gendered norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]