My Gay Middle Ages

by A.W. Strouse

In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse’s “gay lifestyle.” Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would “get in from behind” on cultural history, Strouse instead does a “reach around.” He eschews academic “queer theory” as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of “gross indecency”). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, ebook

First published May 15, 2015

About the author

A.W. Strouse, Ph.D., is a queer anarchist poet with Marxist and Catholic tendencies.

Strouse grew up in a working-class, white family in Appalachian Pennsylvania. At 18 years old, Strouse fled to New York City to come out as a cis gay man and to study literature and urban policy at The New School, where he earned a B.A. in 2008.

For two years, Strouse worked as a community organizer at UFCW. Strouse participated in a coalition that passed legislation to subsidize food access in low-income neighborhoods.

From 2010 to 2012, Strouse studied medieval sex and gender in the Medieval Studies Master’s Program at Fordham University. Strouse published his M.A. thesis as “Misogynists as Queers in Le Livre de La Cité des Dames,” and investigated the late-antique poet Ausonius.

Strouse also vocally criticized the homophobic strictures of academic professionalism, as he experienced them firsthand; and he contributed to efforts to reform graduate education.

In 2012, Strouse entered the English Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a doctoral candidate, Strouse taught at Hunter College, CUNY. Strouse has also taught at Fordham and at The New School. He has offered courses in essay writing, literary theory, historical linguistics, medieval literature and languages, multi-cultural American literature, theology, and queer theory and history.

In 2017, Strouse received a Ph.D. from CUNY and received a prize for “Most Distinguished Dissertation” in English. Strouse’s doctoral research developed into his first monograph, Form and Foreskin: Medieval Narratives of Circumcision (Fordham UP, 2021). This study locates, within canonical poetry and theology, a queer preoccupation with the foreskin as an emblem of the spiritual meaning that is incarnate in narratological forms.

Strouse’s scholarship has fueled his creative writing, especially as he has endeavored to queerly recuperate lost medieval genres. Inspired by The Book of the City of Ladies and The Legend of Good Women—medieval works that collected accounts of famous women—Strouse wrote a series of poetic portraits for the anonymous men whom he encountered on New York’s subway, Transfer Queen (punctum books, 2018). Similarly inspired by medieval rhyming encyclopedias, Strouse rewrote Judith Butler’s classic work of queer theory into rhyming verse, Gender Trouble Couplets, Vol. 1 (punctum, 2019).

Unfortunately, many of Strouse’s early publications had expressed regrettable arguments that stemmed from Strouse’s ambivalent relationship with white, working-class masculinity. Strouse attempted to work out these conflicts through “Can’t Get There from Here”—a cinematic album of country-western folk songs that celebrate gay, interracial love.

More explicitly, Strouse’s forthcoming book will retract many of his previous essays. Taking inspiration from Saint Augustine—the author of Retractions, Confessions, and City of God—Strouse recently completed the manuscript for The Gentrified City of God: Queer and Medieval New York, from 9/11 to COVID-19.

Currently, Strouse is writing a history of gay public sex on the Mexico City subway—a phenomenon that has been salaciously reported by Mexican newspapers and celebrated by major gay, Mexican writers such as Luis Zapata and Carlos Monsiváis, but which warrants fuller study.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is 75 pages. That's it. And I loved every second of it. I thought that it was hilarious and that it seemed like you were listening to that one uncle who's had a little too much to drink talk about his life.

This book doesn't take itself too seriously and the general tone is very light and rambley. It also views gayness in the same way I do so that was a plus. (I'm not Helen the Bisexual, I'm just Helen, I happen to be bi). There is also an iconic woman named Joan, who I kind of want to be when I grow up. Girl boss Joan for president.

This book was free on Google play books, you should definitely read it. You have no excuse.

[Riley Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

brb just got a delete-all-your-social-media-accounts impulse after reading the line "The internet is this way of being a person, without having to have a body"

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly interesting read. The autobiographical account mixing with personal philosophy of how society functions through the eyes of a gay individual resonates with me. Definitely recommend if you need a quick read.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nice, short read that had me laughing while at the same time thinking critically about normative ideals and the general inner workings of daily life. A great insight into the life of the author.