Book excerpt: The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to critically analyze this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, it is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics. The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzaldua, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, it interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.