Go West! (Village): Queer Displacement and New York as the Liberatory West in American Lesbian Fiction

Abstract

This article analyzes the idea of the American West as the promise of hope for freedom, as it was repossessed by United States queer literature after the 1950s. Hope is promised as a total contrast from tradition: for queer, specifically lesbian characters, it switches Eastwards, looking for the dreamland not on going west but on going to New York. Queer narratives since the 1950s draw on the displacement of the lesbian characters from their homes, forc- ing them to relocate, recurrently the West Village in New York. The analysis of storyline repetitions present in representative lesbian fiction throughout the decades will be done on several works. I show that the ideal of the West, core to the construction of the American Dream, was reversed in American lesbian fiction, relocating hope after displacement to the queer populated West Village in New York City.