Heroes, icons, and homonormativity: Exploring the complexities of queer collective biography

LGBTQ+ life stories have been historically silenced, marginalized, and hidden. This paper uses the example of queer collective biographies – illustrated collections of short biographies of LGBTQ+ people from across the world, past and present, and the famous and the everyday – to draw attention to how LGBTQ+ life stories are told. Using a combination of textual and visual analysis and semi-structured interviews with creators, circulators, and readers, this paper attends to how genre-specific conventions of collective biography, celebratory narratives, and the labels of heroes and icons, perpetuate homonormative ideals of visibility, productivity, and respectability. In doing so, the queer collective biographies convey implicit messages of validity, acceptability, and responsibility for LGBTQ+ communities, and therefore undermines their radical queer potential.