Ecopoetics Along Shorelines

Muñoz’s final line, contrasting “being gay” with “queerness,” challenges the presumption that these are synonymous or even parallel concepts. “Being gay,” in the era after what Muñoz calls “gay liberation,” is perhaps no longer a deviant sexuality, at least not so deviant as it was in the 1960s (Is “liberation” itself the “not-yet-here?” Will it ever be here?) This stands apart from “queerness” as surplus, in the sense of excess or “deviance from conventional forms” – that is, as something that has nothing necessarily to do with sex, and also as something that one cannot and should not be “liberated” from.