Gay Shame
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

Gay Shame
Beyond Gay Pride
David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub
Why Gay Shame Now?
David M. Halperin
Performing Shame
Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Mario Montez, For Shame
Douglas Crimp
White-on-White: The Overbearing Whiteness of Warhol Being
Taro Nettleton
Boricua Gazing: An Interview with Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Rita Gonzalez
Spectacles of Shame
Shame on Me
Elisabeth Ladenson
On the Uses of Shame and Gifts of a Bloodmobile: Musings from a Musical Queer Apprenticeship
Nadine Hubbs
Shame on Me, or The Naked Truth about Me and Marlene Dietrich
David Caron
Teaching Shame
Ellis Hanson
Shameful Fantasies: Cross-Gender Queer Sex in Lesbian Erotic Fiction
Amalia Ziv
Excluding Shame
Leo Bersani
Disabled Shame
Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability
Robert McRuer
Slipping
Abby Wilkerson
Where Is the Truth in Painting Today?
Dylan Scholinski
Tough
Terry Galloway
Sex, Shame, and Disability Identity: With Reference to Mark O’Brien
Tobin Siebers
Histories of Shame
The Shame of Queer History/Queer Histories of Shame
Helmut Puff
The Shame of Gay Pride in Early AIDS Activism
Deborah B. Gould
Emotional Rescue
Heather K. Love
The Trouble with Shame
George Chauncey
Pleasures and Dangers of Shame
Michael Warner
Shamefully Gay: Documents from the Labadie Collection
Julie Herrada and Tim Retzloff
Communities of Shame
How Might We Create a Collectivity That We Would Want to Belong To?
Barry D. Adam
Scandalous Acts: The Politics of Shame among Brazilian Travesti Prostitutes
Don Kulick and Charles Klein
“Plunge Into Your Shame”
Neil Bartlett
Gay Shame and the Politics of Identity
Jennifer Moon
A Little Humility
Gayle Rubin
Enactivism: The Movie
Dennis Allen, Jaime Hovey, and Judith Roof
On the DVD
Totally Kickball, or The Philosophy of Activity-ism
Emma Crandall
Tough
Terry Galloway
Enactivism: The Movie
Dennis Allen, Jaime Hovey, and Judith Roof
Nine Artworks
Dylan Scholinski
Shamelessly Gay: Documents from the Labadie Collection
Julie Herrada and Tim Retzloff
Kiko: Five Color Photographs (to accompany Ellis Hanson, “Teaching Shame”)
Marlene Dietrich: Four Black-and-White Photographs (to accompany David Caron, “Shame on Me, or The Naked Truth about Me and Marlene Dietrich”)
Gay Shame Conference Poster
List of Contributors
Index
“Gay Shame is an embarrassment of riches about the riches of embarrassment. As theatrical as they are theoretical, the essays collected here remind us of what we might like to forget: the powerful role of shame in gay lives, gay politics, and gay culture. Not just reflecting on shame but performing it as well, these angry, funny, sexy writings take us out of our comfort zones and put us back in touch with the queer pleasures of feeling bad.”
“What has been gained and what lost in insisting that we are proud to be gay? Are we losing our outsiderhood and do we want to? These were the questions that in 2003 brought a motley group of academics, performers, and activists to Ann Arbor, the home of an increasingly vibrant queer academic community. Fractious and infuriating, lively and fun, the Gay Shame Conference fulfilled the promise of its startlingly beautiful and disturbing poster that now hangs over my desk. If you couldn’t be there you now can share in the controversies and conversations over race, disability, aesthetics, history, and more through this important book and DVD, with additional essays that enrich the conference theme.”
Lambda Literary Foundation: Lambda Literary Awards
Finalist
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