Introduction

Abstract

This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” The forum opens with Cohen’s reflection on the article she wrote twenty years ago. Other authors in the forum then ruminate on such topics as the potential erasure of the queer political history that the original article provoked readers to consider in the time during and since its printing, the haunting answer to the original article’s haunting subtitular question—“the radical potential of queer politics?,” and new political alliances that might fit under the rubric of queer in our contemporary moment.