Delighted to be the spotlit writer for SASFest 2026 this week!
SAS Speaker Spotlight:
Jonathan Alexander
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine. A writer of 20+ books, he blends memoir and criticism in work often described as autotheory. His titles include Writing & Desire, Stroke Book (Fordham), and a trilogy—Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology; Bullied: The Story of an Abuse; and Dear Queer Self. Honors include a Lambda Literary finalist nod, a gold IPPY, an INDIES finalist citation, and the Lavender Rhetorics Award.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan to learn more about his thoughts on writing and art, and his soon-to-be published book, Damage.
What about “critical memoir” calls to you as a writer and scholar?
I’ve spent most of my career as an academic, writing in very scholarly modes. However, in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, which had a very significant impact on my family, I realized that I wanted to write about my experiences growing up in Louisiana, and I couldn’t quite do that in a purely scholarly fashion. I tried, writing a review for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the HBO show TREME, for instance, but I also felt the pull to write more immediately, even more viscerally about what it was like to grow up queer in New Orleans during the 80s. It was as though Katrina and its impact on my family dredged up a lot of thinking and feeling and remembering that I needed to start to acknowledge and find a way to write through.
What themes do you see overlapping across your personal and academic interests?
I think the theme that unites all of my writing, whether academic or creative nonfiction, clusters around the need to connect deeply personal experiences with larger social and even political situations and histories. I grew up during the very homophobic 80s at the height of the AIDS epidemic and it was abundantly clear to me that queer people were definitely not a desirable segment of the American population. With politicians threatening to put us in camps or tattoo us as a form of warning to others, not to mention the frequently proclaimed assertion that AIDS was a divinely just punishment for being queer, my sense of self as a queer person was formed through social and political awareness of how undesirable I was as a human being. Ever since then, my personal struggle has been to value who it is that I am as a human being, and especially as a queer human being. That struggle can never be purely personal; it is intimately connected to my early experiences of intense homophobia, both locally in New Orleans, but also as mediated through national coverage of the AIDS epidemic.
Can you speak more about The Creep Trilogy and how that project came about, and grew?
In so many ways, that trilogy arose directly out of my attempt to grapple with that intimate intertwining of personal and political experience. I wrote the CREEP trilogy as a way to understand how my early experiences with homophobia had shaped my sense of self so deeply, tempting me to think that I myself was a creep, as opposed to being able to recognize the true creepiness of a society that would try to convince a young person that he was going to hell for being queer. I recount painful experiences with homophobic bullying as well as my reactions to the various historical dramas playing out in the 80s and 90s about queer rights. By the time I get to the final volume, DEAR QUEER SELF, I am writing a letter to my younger self in recognition of how significant it is that he survived everything that he did. So the trilogy becomes a way from me, not just to document homophobic experiences, but to also honor survivorship.
We’re very excited for your book DAMAGE coming out this May! What about queer art and pain have you discovered while working on this project?
In so many ways, the new book, DAMAGE, which I think of as an autotheoretical text, combining both memoir and critical analysis, picks up on the work of the trilogy. It asks some of the same questions. How do gay or queer people who have grown up with significant homophobic violence, sometimes compounded by racism and misogyny and ableism, deal with the psychic and physical damages done to them? Instead of focusing just on myself, I look at five artists whose work seems to me emblematic of different responses to this question. Herve Guibert and Mark Morrisroe created stunning visual work in response to grappling with living with HIV as a death sentence. Carlos Martiel’s endurance performances challenge us to think about the brutal physical and psychic legacies of slavery from a queer perspective. Laura Aguilar brilliant photographs turn our attention to Chicana subjectivity and fatness as they intersect
queer experience. And Catherine Opie explored in her own flesh the struggle, including the pains and the delights, in creating queer family. For each of these artists, the queer struggle is certainly at times about finding moments of beauty, even joy, but those moments cannot be separated from the ongoing struggle with dealing with the damages of living in a homophobic culture. In fact, part of what I explore in DAMAGE is how grappling with those damages is key to understanding not only these artists’s aesthetic practices, but the kind and quality of beauty that they are able to create.
Can you talk more about your experiences conversing with fellow queer artists, and if/how those conversations have inspired you to turn inward as well?
In a weird way, my work in analyzing these artists has perhaps inspired me to turn more outward than inward! I have begun my own artistic practice of self representation as a way to explore beauty arising out of damage. I include some of my own photographs in the book as well.
How do you hope readers will come away from Damage, connecting either with the stories you recount or the theories you postulate?
I hope that readers will experience some of my deep admiration for the artists that I write about, and that they will seek out even more artists who explore the complexity of being queer. If anything, DAMAGE might be thought of as a field guide for others to take and continue their own journeys in thinking about crafting survival, and hopefully even joyful queer lives, even as we continue to contend with the challenges of living in a homophobic culture.
As a returning Saints & Sinners participant, what about SASFest are you most looking forward to this year?
Besides returning to my hometown for the week and enjoying some wonderful food, I am most looking forward to listening to some great writing and to reconnecting with friends and making new ones as well!