“Happily Ever After”: The Tragic Queer and Delany’s Comic Book Fairy Tale

In this article, I discuss the formulations of queer futurity and normativity in Samuel Delany’s autobiographical graphic novel Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, drawn by artist Mia Wolff. The love story that is depicted via an interplay of text and imagery resists clichéd homonormative recasting of existing familial templates and questions how expectations queer happiness are bounded by a persistent set of social norms (race, class, education, and income) and their intersections. I also suggest how happy endings can function as a renegotiation of the utopian impulse into something more complex and realistic.