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So it turns out that Sedgwick’s identifications with both gay men and Queen Esther were not very different from Woolf’s identifications with Strachey and Carrington. It also turns out that postmodern criticism—or queer theory, at any rate (thanks, once again, to Sedgwick herself)—is still more capable than modern literature of comprehending (both willing to deploy and able to fathom) sentimentality. More…

I knew lots of people like that—unloved because unlovable. Toward them I was always cold. Maybe I held them at arm’s length to disguise from myself our shared predicament. And so, by trying to disguise something from yourself, you declare it to everyone else—because part of what makes a person unlovable is his inability to love. More…