David Deutsch’s Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture makes a compelling case for the centrality of angelic figures and discourse in queer US literature, primarily by gay men, from the past century. Extending farther than his title suggests, his archive is bookended on one side by the Harlem Renaissance and on the other by Rabih Alameddine’s 2016 novel The Angel of History. Deutsch defines “bad beatitudes,” found across the varied works he analyzes, as “states of being that embody an unconventional grace obtained through reconceptualizing and even exalting, if frequently uncertainly or ambivalently so, conventionally degrading behaviors or identities, such as same-sex sex or nonconformist genders” (2). Because they are divine in human form, the angels in queer literature reconfigure the sacred and the profane and also work through other seeming dichotomies, including butch and femme, pleasure and pain, oppression and liberation, “the almost indissoluble tension between shame and ecstasy,” and “queer pessimism and queer optimism” (18). Building on work queering religion by John A. McClure (2007), Elizabeth Freeman (2019), and Peter Coviello (2019), Deutsch reads the ambiguity of the angelic figure as characterizing its politics, sometimes suspended between regression and progression, complicity and subversion.Deutsch offers four main case studies. In chapter 1 he reads John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night and the 1991 essay “Outlaw Sensibility” as attempting a renovation of the angels from Rechy’s Mexican Catholic childhood home in order to redeem queerness as a welcome transcendence of earthly norms. In Deutsch’s interpretation, Rechy also turns to angels as a more masculine and heroic version of the also-winged but feminized and degraded fairy figures associated with gay men: both “fly away from . . . social and religious tyrannies” (58), but the angel is more attractive for someone like Rechy’s protagonist, whose internalized homophobia makes him anxious of appearing feminine.In chapter 2 Deutsch turns to the Harlem Renaissance, whose queer angelic references he situates within the “spiritual striving” that W. E. B. DuBois believed brought people to the “Negro Church” and what Alain Locke in 1925 called the mingling of “Christian” and “‘almost pagan elements’ in ‘Spirituals’” (65). The chapter begins with short readings of works by Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, followed by a much more detailed reading of Richard Bruce Nugent’s unfinished novel Uranus in Cancer, which remains unpublished except for an abridged section in Thomas Wirth’s 2002 Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. Summoning a multiracial cast with characters named Angel and Jesus—names that signify biblically in the African American vernacular and prosaically in the Latinx—Nugent’s project envisions a spiritual building of a more inclusive queer world. This extended reading of an unpublished Nugent text is Deutsch’s greatest gift to us in his book.Chapter 3 turns to Allen Ginsberg, whose angels continue the outlaw tradition of Rechy and Nugent while also taking on a particularly anticapitalist stance to “defy the constraints of an egotistically avaricious American culture” (127). Ginsberg, who “had his first visionary experience while masturbating and reading William Blake,” “used eroticized Blakean religious imagery to fashion prismatic conceptions of morality through multi-perspectival poetics” (106). In particular, Ginsberg absorbs a “Blakean synthesis of multiple binaries” into “one holy homoerotic unity” (118), advancing a Whitmanesque project for the twentieth century. At the endpoint of this project is a new imagination of “socialist queer consumerisms” (131).In chapter 4 Deutsch jumps to Alameddine’s Angel of History, which he takes up as an example of new meanings that the queer angel developed in the context of HIV/AIDS. Perhaps wary of treading ground already covered by others, Deutsch avoids discussing at length more obvious texts like Tony Kushner’s 1991 play Angels in America. The protagonist of Alameddine’s novel, who is haunted either really or fantastically by the fallen angel Satan, explores the spiritual register of seroconversion and the necessity of “remembering the past so as to strategically forget it” (150). Along the way, the novel, exhibiting Alameddine’s “ambiguous or even ambivalent optimism” (177), assesses how racial fetishization destabilizes the emancipatory politics sometimes celebrated in S&M. In his conclusion Deutsch advances his own optimistic view that greater acceptance of queer genders and sexualities will make the angelic figure’s combination of sacred and profane less relevant, even as “the establishment of any too sure or any too unambivalent sense of what counts as sacred or profane or moral or immoral or good or bad or ugly or beautiful would inevitably present its own problems and tyrannies, new forms of homonormativity, which would then themselves have to be rebelled against” (183).One strength of narrating literary history through a figure like the angel, rather than through genealogies of particular schools or social networks, is that Deutsch can track resonances that we otherwise might have missed across disparate queer authors—for instance, his discovery that Ginsberg might have more in common with Rechy and Nugent than with other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs (108–12). At the same time, when Deutsch tracks “angelic outlaw tropes” more than angels themselves (4), he risks a tendency he notices in Nugent’s protagonist: “Refusal to abide by accepted relationship structures can go too far, as when Angel excessively distorts actual identities and mistakes metaphors for actualities” (85). If the theoretical value of the angel is as a Luciferian outlaw, then it becomes unclear at times if this story is more about outlaws than about angels.This lack of particularity matters because of the related thinness of Deutsch’s historicism, so when he observes that “queer bad beatitudes stem from the 1920s in US literature and hit particular high points in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s” (105), we are left wondering why. Deutsch does provide historical context—especially the coincidence of the Lavender Scare and the Red Scare and, of course, the devastation of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and its becoming more manageable and chronic instead of inevitably fatal for many in the 1990s—but his main priority is prolonged and sometimes too extensive close readings of his chosen literary texts. A wider cultural perspective might have counteracted some of his literary hermeticism.In his introduction Deutsch registers an awareness that others may fault him for having both too wide and too narrow an archive: too racially diverse for him to do justice to distinct genealogies (something for which he faults Ginsberg, who “is certainly not, as he claims, one of the Scottsboro boys and his enlightened consciousness stemming from his queer Jewish Russian quasi-communist background can go only so far to understanding their position” [135]), yet too narrowly androcentric, so that queer in this account really means cis gay men. His response to the first issue is perhaps too quick: “Inevitably the study will fail to achieve the right balance, for which one can blame variously my own intellectual limitations, my desire to attend to diverse authors from different backgrounds in one book, and people who talk loudly in libraries” (16). His response to the second is more understandable: it is the archive’s fault, with a dearth of lesbian, trans, and nonbinary angels (although he points us to Adrienne Rich’s “This Beast, This Angel,” “Lucifer in the Train,” and “Gabriel” and to Audre Lorde’s “For Each of You” and “Movement Song” for further reading [20]). But here it would be good for Deutsch to ask why the archive is constituted in this way, or what prior exclusions make the hybridity and fluidity of the angelic figure attractive, or even available, for some writers and not for others. I am thinking, for instance, of Black feminist accounts, beginning with Hortense J. Spillers’s (1987), of how gender difference was denied to the enslaved and Black subject—in what Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2008: 197) calls the “painful fluidities” of the Middle Passage and what Sarah Haley (2019: 290n149) calls the “forced queering” of Black women incarcerated under Jim Crow—and how the Black woman has instead been tasked with what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020: 11) calls a queer “plasticity.” I am thinking, too, of Grace Lavery (2020: 722), who, pushing back against the fetish of free play in queer theory, seeks instead to theorize “the ontologies of trans life absent the categories of parody and drag and to orient us away from the descriptions of trans as instability, fuckery, or interstitiality that reduce such ontologies to intellectual or aesthetic patterns.”In all, Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture is a detailed examination of its archive, with insightful and sustained close readings that animate the transhuman potentiality of angelic figures. It will interest not only queer theorists, scholars of post-1945 US literature, and critics of postsecular faith and religion in American culture but also readers looking for “bad beatitudes” in what seems an increasingly cursed present.