ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the appropriation of the anthology by early gay rights activists to support a minoritarian model of homosexuality and to establish a usable history for the gay rights movement. This chapter will trace the queer history of the gay anthology from its earliest exemplar in the first half of the nineteenth century, which clearly patterned itself on the Greek Anthologies, to the anthologies that appeared in the early twentieth century, which introduced not only a chronological, but also an “evolutionary” arrangement of texts, and in so doing inscribed gay liberation within a Western developmental history. Special focus will be paid to the tension between the anthologies’ minoritizing mission and the queer texts they contained, precipitating an identity crisis in post-Stonewall anthologies, by exposing the fundamental incoherence of their contents.
