This chapter begins by claiming that in comparison to its British and French contemporaries, American modernism does not contain a lot of obviously queer texts. That is, American modernism does not represent homosexuality explicitly very often. There are exceptions, of course – Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Charles Henri Ford and Park Tyler’s The Young and the Evil offer three such examples, but same-sex relations are not central subjects in the way that they are in contemporaneous texts such as Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, André Gide’s Miracle of the Rose, or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. This chapter aims to explain this peculiarity and thus to provide a theory of queer American modernism itself by examining two key sites of its production: namely, the Provincetown Theater and the Harlem Renaissance.

What are the legacies of American Puritanism? The answers might surprise you. Somewhat paradoxically, these legacies are somehow both nearly invisible in the contemporary United States and also ubiquitous. On one hand, there is very little evidence of the theology or polity of seventeenth-century New England Puritans visible in today’s religious or political culture. It would be difficult to find an extant church offering a semblance of the services the Puritans attended, and even churches that claim a link to this time are quick to emphasize their evolution. At the same time, “puritan” persists in our culture as a byword for everything that is more repressive and less sexually evolved than we are. For instance, activists who want more freedom for nudity and sexual expression on social media often blame puritans for these restrictions. This differentiation between a contemporary Us and a puritan Them creates space for caricature that opens up space for what I call “settler kitsch,” an array of cartoonish, caricatured images of the settlers of New England, impossible to take seriously with their big hats and funny shoes. At the same time, these cartoons obscure an actual cognizance of Puritans by concealing the violence inherent in the settler colonial projects of Pilgrims and Puritans. As such, the principal legacies of Puritanism today are #freethenipple and settler kitsch.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the censor’s dilemma: the notion that censors in America may wield significant power for a limited time, but ultimately are undone by the principles of free expression embodied in the First Amendment. Because of this, reformers seek to avoid the label of “censor,” even when their goal is to suppress speech. The urge to censor comes from both the political left and the right, yet both sides claim that only their antagonists engage in censorship. Paradoxically, censors exude sanctimony and a sense of certainty, but cannot shake off the taint of illegitimacy in societies devoted to freedom of expression.

Floyd Abrams’ Foreword sets forth the premise of the book: that America has faced recurring episodes of censorship and that censors may be admired in their time, but that freedom of speech, as protected by the First Amendment, has flourished. For that reason, censors try to avoid being called censors.

Chapter 4 sets forth the “Comstock Playbook,” the techniques used by the anti-vice crusader to attack his adversaries, which have been emulated by censors ever since. His strategies include exhibiting moral certainty, equating opposition to your cause with the love of vice, denouncing and discrediting adversaries, promoting xenophobia, poisoning the debate with invective, touting pseudo science, seeking publicity, exaggeratingthe threat to be overcome, hyping all accomplishments, and playing the martyr.