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Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (GLBTQ) scholars today face an unprecedented travesty of their long-standing struggles for liberation and equality both in academe and throughout the public sphere. Notwithstanding increased positive GLBTQ representation in films and on television, anti-GLBTQ violence and disempowering legislative initiatives evidence a pervasive chipping away at hard-won pro-GLBTQ battles by neoconservative and neoliberal forces, which have insinuated themselves through the back door. The acuteness of these troubling conditions prompts urgent questions among GLBTQ film and media scholars, not least because their primary areas of study lie at the center of battles for control of public knowledge production about the general subject. These battles are now producing some of the most egregious consolidations of media industrial power in history: recalling Ben H. Bagdikian, the communications industry has become a “media monopoly” that works to sustain multinational rivalry over the world’s dwindling natural resources and increasingly disenfranchised labor force, dumb down the populace, politically isolate demographic regions, and suppress speech and free dissent, especially regarding strategies of resistance, wherever they may flourish.1 The following roundtable on queer film and media pedagogy is intended to

This article examines the author's reactions to teaching Janet Jakobsen's and Ann Pellegini's Love the Sin in a course titled “Contemporary Issues in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies” at Dartmouth College. He examines not only the students' reactions and the points at which they can or cannot grasp the book's arguments, but also his own responses to their reactions. At the center of the essay is his realization that the students, having been brought up in a liberal mode of “tolerance,” have little access to Jakobsen and Pellegrini's social or political concept of “sexual freedom”; and, while they completely eschew state regulation of sexuality, they do not view it as an essential human right, but rather as a private matter.

This chapter attempts a reparative telling of queer poetic history. It traces how the North American poetry has imagined, and has rendered imaginable, transformations of self and community. The chapter describes four topoi and representative poets that help illustrate poetry's subjunctive historicity: Queer Identification, Queer Influence, Queer Resistance, and Queer Horizons. Romantic outlawry stretches back to French nineteenth-century visionary Arthur Rimbaud, who influenced later queer verse like that of sex worker and thief Jean Genet. Such queer poetic resistance need not be reduced to romantic individualism, though. Indeed, Jean Genet's and Allen Ginsberg's work serves as reminders that social and juridico-legal institutions mandate sexual and gender outliers' marginalization. The dream, memory, and futurity di Prima writes about are the building blocks of poetry's subjunctive history. Instead of disclosing a particular truth or prescribing a course of action, poetry trains readers to see the world differently, queerly.

The 1990s are unique in the history of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) cinema in that they saw the release of an unusually large number of LGBT-themed films — more than 75, including Hollywood productions, independent productions, and British and European films released in the United States. This output spans a wide range of themes, genres, and artistic and narrative approaches and, as will be argued below, it reflects a spectrum of political perspectives. This cinematic embarrassment of riches makes perfect sense when viewed against the background of the decade's extraordinarily vibrant political and social developments. In retrospect, the 1990s were clearly a pivotal period for LGBT politics and artistic endeavor. Keywords: queer cinema; cross-dressing; gay; homosexual; lesbian; HIV-AIDS; drag; transgender