Introduction: On the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of GLQ

At twenty-five years, most marriages are dying a slow death, if they have made it that long. Luckily for us (and you, Dear Reader), gay marriage was not legal when this journal was founded: indeed, GLQ began promiscuously and without fidelity to any discipline. In doing so, it charted perverse intellectual paths, marrying no one. GLQ was created in a heady moment fostered through the queer love and friendship of our fierce founding editors, Carolyn Dinshaw and David Halperin.

In their first editorial, Carolyn and David proclaimed it was "time for a new journal" (Dinshaw and Halperin 1993: iv). Even then, they voiced concerns about lesbian and gay studies "losing its edge and narrowing its desires" with the institutionalization that founding a journal signifies (ibid.). Certainly, formalization has meant that queer studies has not necessarily kept up with the pace of queer desire, queer media, and cultural production, or the changing dynamics of queer and trans lifeworlds. We know that there is no purely queer space, yet we seek survival in queer forms. In the pages of this special issue we see artful critical research inspired by these aesthetics, unbound by the intervening interests of multiple spheres.

Even now, at twenty-five, GLQ is just getting started.

Although we have faced marginalization as a field and institutionalization in the "academic-industrial complex," things here are not settled: we seem always to be vacillating between possibility and precarity. What we call queer theory, or "lesbian and gay studies" (to quote our increasingly problematic subtitle), has changed over time as a result of the radical essays produced in our pages. We have transformed from an emergent field defining its contours through the exposition of lesbian and gay subjects into an interdisciplinary area of critique that seeks to produce epistemological and ontological interventions. The constitutive "outside"—once signified by trans studies, disability studies, and queer of color critique—has been incorporated into the journal's pages. Meanwhile, there's always a hot new thing hanging outside the club.

David, Carolyn, and our dedicated editors throughout the years have envisioned a future for gay, lesbian, and queer studies that may not have come to be. This is the familiar heartbreak of things as we imagine them rubbing up against what is possible. This desire to harness radical potential may be voiced best by Susan Stryker in her 2004 essay "Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin," in which she writes: "The queer vision that animated my life, and the lives of so many others in the brief historical moment of the early 1990s, held out the dazzling prospect of a compensatory, utopian reconfiguration of community. It seemed an anti-oedipal ecstatic leap into a postmodern space of possibility in which the foundational containers of desire could be ruptured to release a raw erotic power that could be harnessed to a radical social agenda. That vision still takes my breath away" (213).

Unfulfilled promise notwithstanding, we are still here, still queer, mediating conversations that could not be imagined in 1993. And so, in anticipation of this unimagined moment, we put out a broad call for submissions from our former editors, editorial board, subeditors, readers, and other constituents. Our call read:

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the journal, we wish to commemorate the impact of GLQ on the field of queer theory. This anniversary issue will reconsider key works from the journal that have resonated in their moment and beyond.

We solicit short thought-pieces … on an article or special issue published by GLQ that has shaped the field of queer theory. These mini-essays should discuss the significance of the essay or issue in question. We encourage creative engagements with those works that have been most important to our readers. This call is open to all readers of GLQ, and we welcome your responses both individually and collectively. Finally, we hope that this process will recognize those contributions to the journal that have both sparked debate and transformed the field.

We were lucky to have received a good number of responses, many of which...