Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558610804
Publication Date: 11-14-2023

The David R. Kessler Lectures, established in 1992 by CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, represent the cutting edge of queer studies in the United States. Years before LGBTQ studies had found a foothold in American academia, the Kessler Lectures celebrated dynamic and diverse inquiries into queer thought, community, and politics.

Twenty years after its initial publication, Queer Ideas collects the first ten historic Kessler Lectures by influential scholars, writers, and activists including Cherríe Moraga, Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Smith, with a new foreword by CLAGS Executive Director Matt Brim and Board Co-Chairs James Harris and Laura Westengard. Alongside the second volume, Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002–2020, this revised edition of Queer Ideas traces the early foundations of the field and provides a new opportunity to revisit an essential collection of queer and trans thought.

“Brave and brilliant, fabulous and deep, these ten visionary thinkers teach us how queer ideas can and must and do reshape the world.” —David L. Eng, author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation