Sedgwick, Closet

"We can't possibly know in advance about the Harlem Renaissance, any more than we can about the New England Renaissance or the English or Italian Renaissance, where the limits of a revelatory inquiry are to be set, once we begin to ask--as it is now beginning to be asked about each of these Renaissances--where and how the power in them of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were manifest. We know enough already, however, to know with certainty that in each of these Renaissances they were central. (No doubt that's how we will learn to recognize a renaissance when we see one.)