The Gay 90s episode artwork

EPISODE · May 4, 2026 · 44 MIN

The Gay 90s

from Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast · host Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall

Come with the queens as they travel back to a time of gay bookstores, queer anthems, and a boom in LGBT+ publishing: the gay 90s! Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes:Check out Michael Nava's wonderful essay "Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing, Part II"Learn more about Gendertrash zineRead Melvin Dixon's essay "I'll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name." Read more about Texas Tech's limitations on studying gender and sexuality.Sabah as-Sabah's work appears in many 90s anthologies, including In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers (1992; edited by Kevin Powell & Ras Baraka), Catch the Fire!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (1998), and The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (ed. Assotto Saint, 1991).  Read Audre Lorde's "The Electric Slide Boogie" in The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance: 1987-1992.Read Marilyn Hacker's "The Boy"Justin Chin's "Cocksucker's Blues" is included in his first book of poems, Bite Hard (1997). Watch a tribute to Chin here. Here's the table of contents (with some hyperlinks) of The World in Us, edited by Elena Georgiou and Michael Lassell.You can read Maureen Seaton's "Blonde Ambition" (and the entirety of Furious Cooking)Read Dennis Cooper's "After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade"Read Gerry Gomez Pearlberg's "Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette" Some queer poets/poems we mention: Eileen Myles, "American Poem"JD McClatchy, "My Mammogram"David TrinidadRafael Campo, The Other Man Was MeEloise Klein HealyFrank Paino, The Rapture of MatterPaul Monette, 18 Elegies for RogJoan LarkinJudy GrahnRobin BeckerMaggie AndersonRichard McCann, Ghost LettersWayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's ThroatChrystosCheryl Clarke

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published May 4, 2026

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Come with the queens as they travel back to a time of gay bookstores, queer anthems, and a boom in LGBT+ publishing: the gay 90s! Support Breaking Form by reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts here. Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE is available from Bridwell Press. James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books. Show Notes: Check out Michael Nava's wonderful essay "Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomp...

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The Gay 90s

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