Queer Modernism

This article examines the history of the prominence of same-sex eros in modernism. It explains that the most established narrative about same-sex eros holds that medicine and jurisprudence created the concept of the homosexual by assigning him or her an identity or category which contrasted with another newly formulated concept: the heterosexual. The article argues that to emphasize homosexuality as a product of medical and juridical innovations is to overlook modernist homosexuality's derivation from ideologies which characterize queer persons as standard bearers of culture and as paragons of democratic citizenship. It describes some notable modernist fiction about queer love.