ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the queer appeal of dark academia, which lies in its upper-class aesthetics coupled with an illusory promise of queer belonging. The protagonists of dark academia find themselves awed by the material and intellectual pleasures offered by exclusive university education. The academic environment is suffused with privilege of leading a leisurely life devoted to the pursuit of pure knowledge, often accompanied by a mystery that needs solving. Thus, the genre obscures the class inequalities and economic precarity of the American university system. The pleasures of taking on an upper-class lifestyle are interwoven with dark academia’s centering of queer intimacies. The university provides an escape from the pressures of heteronormative life in spatial and temporal sense. This chapter proposes a reading of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and Lee Mandelo’s Summer Sons (2021) which illuminates the entanglements of upper class and queerness in dark academia, arguing that the academic queer utopias promised in the novels fail due to reestablishment of strict class hierarchies.
