Precisely not gay, yet deeply homoerotic, Allen Ginsberg's work could appear self-contradictory until the advent of a queer politics underscored the strategic benefit in any such refusal of gayness. In this talk, Katz places Ginsberg and General Idea in a long tradition of anti-gay queers, situating their seeming contradictions in the socio-political context of their times.

Jonathan David Katz (born 1958) is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer. He is currently the director of the doctoral program in Visual culture studies at State University of New York at Buffalo. He is also the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University. He is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States. Katz was an associate professor in the Art History Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also taught queer studies. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1996.

Katz works at the intersection of art history and queer history, one of the busiest intersections in American culture, and yet one of the least studied. A specialist in the arts of the Cold War era, he is centrally concerned with the question of why the American avant-garde came to be dominated and defined by queer artists during what was perhaps the single most homophobic decade in this nation’s history. He is the founder of the Harvey Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association.