ABSTRACT
In his elegy for his friend Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg described the New York School Poet as a “curator of funny emotions,” a phrase that Henry Abelove, who took the title of his book Deep Gossip from Ginsberg’s elegy, understands as a resonant description of the project of queer scholarship in general. This chapter considers the prominence of O’Hara and other New York School poets in important theoretical work by figures including José Esteban Muñoz and Maggie Nelson and suggests that an important strain of queer work on affect might be seen as a continuation of a set of ideas about aesthetics and sexuality found in a particular form of queer late modernism. Tracing the late modernist roots of queer theory's thinking about funny emotions helps to clarify a number of ongoing critical debates about potentiality, attachment, and relatability.
