ABSTRACT
Critical of the state, religious institutions, and other centralized authorities that suppressed individuals’ freedoms, anarchism offered a philosophy or worldview supporting queer modernists’ efforts to connect their art to their own gendered and sexual experiences. Queer modernists who were unaligned leftists or self-identified anarchists developed their aesthetic visions and creative experiments out of philosophical anarchism, an often “unpolitical” brand of libertarianism emphasizing politicized ethics. By reimagining community and social relations, they hoped to transform readers’ consciousnesses and inspire them to pursue principles of mutual aid maximizing individuals’ freedoms, including sexual ones. This chapter examines queer American unaligned leftist and anarchist modernists from the interwar and Cold War periods—Margaret Anderson, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hart Crane, Robert Duncan, Muriel Rukeyser, and Allen Ginsberg. Continuing a queer libertarian line of modernist anarchism begun by Walt Whitman, these authors bridge the Old and New Lefts. Their Whitmanic libertarian line suggests queer modernism’s unacknowledged influence on the personal politics of later gender and sexual liberation movements.
