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Copiously illustrated, Queer Lens explores the transformative role of photography in LGBTQ+ communities from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Anthology

“An outstanding addition to the growing body of scholarship around queer imagery.”
—Jim Van Buskirk, The Bay Area Reporter
 
“A tour de force. . . . A profound collective story of creativity, joy and resistance.”
—Emma Jacob, Aesthetica Magazine
 
“Potent and inspiring. . . . An empowering photography retrospective that reflects American queer communities.”
—Aleena Ortiz, Foreword Reviews
 
“A deeply significant and beautifully produced volume."
—All About Photo.com
 
“Eye-catching."
—Matthew Wexler, Queerty.com

Photography’s power to capture a subject—representing reality, or a close approximation—has inherently been linked with the construction and practice of identity. Since the camera’s invention in 1839, and despite periods of severe homophobia, the photographic art form has been used by and for individuals belonging to dynamic LGBTQ+ communities, helping shape and affirm queer culture and identity across its many intersections.

Queer Lens explores this transformative force of photography, which has played a pivotal role in increasing queer visibility. Lively essays by scholars and artists explore myriad manifestations of queer culture, both celebrating complex interpretations of people and relationships and resisting rigid definitions. Featuring a rich selection of images—including portraits of queer individuals, visual records of queer kinship, and documentary photographs of early queer groups and protests—this volume investigates the medium’s profound role in illuminating the vibrant tapestry of LGBTQ+ communities.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 17 to September 28, 2025.

In Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a figurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overflowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthetics, one that uses an idiom of fluidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in English. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge.
 
Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis—a major scholarly contribution.

 

 

New poetry from Stevie Edwards, author of Sadness Workshop

Quiet Armor, the third full-length collection from poet Stevie Edwards, examines how capitalism and patriarchy impact romantic relationships and, more broadly, intimacy. Edwards considers the ways in which confessional performances of vulnerability can be coercive, whether popular culture encourages men to seek validation through sexual excess and aggression, and how we encourage women to be complicit in figurative and literal violence against other women.

Drawing on historical and mythological figures—including Medusa, Persephone, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Christina—Edwards builds a fierce investigation into how rape culture has shaped the literary canon, academia, and the world at large. She brings readers into the quiet and intimate spaces we create despite trauma—or perhaps even because of it. Ultimately, Quiet Armor seeks to reclaim positive intimacy, showing us not only the desperate battles but also the healing embraces. All the while, these poems ask us: What does the end of rape culture look like? How do we get there?

Quiet Orient Riot is an exploration of the tendons of motherhood, its mutinies and munificences. It is also a book of births and the politics of birth-regimes. Recounting a journey to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, the poems conjure up maternity as forecast, tally, weapon; its many filtrations through liturgical command and demographic anxiety. Maternity is made possible through contingent access to Israel’s sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure, and it’s made impossible as it coincides with Israel’s 2009 assault on the Gaza Strip. What kind of language, then, can hold a body inside a body through emergency, diminishment, and into resistance and bloom? What kind of language might hold precarious humanhood?
 
Most significantly, Quiet Orient Riot asks of itself, without release or relief: can a text seek linguistic disorientation and reorientation both? Can a text walk the tightrope from detail to detail to envision a kind of awareness that is kin to worship? Quiet Orient Riot does not shy away from a word like “worship.” Nor does it shy away from how such worship might manifest in the words of a poem, bowing to a “chirpy printed sound” in Palestine and a forest of “little justices.”

She is the winner of the 2019 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Dawn Lundy Martin.


 

Quixotic Authority reveals how deeply absorbed reading was inextricable from and essential to British women's professional writing and cultural commentary from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The trope of quixotism, what we might today call "fangirling," had distinctly gendered implications, as the female quixote was almost exclusively associated with uncritical, overly absorptive novel reading, and often portrayed as a self-centered, deluded, ill-educated home-wrecker who must be reformed or punished. But what do we make of the fact that women wrote most of the depictions of female quixotes in novels of this period? Jodi Wyett shows that authors such as Charlotte Lennox and Jane Austen wrote quixote narratives to assert their own professional cachet as well as validate the passion and intelligence of women novel readers. Harnessing the power of the genre, they debunked proscriptive contemporary discourse denigrating both women and the novel. This book redefines the female quixote as a fierce fangirl both modeled in fiction and embodied by her creators.