In her study, The Last Eminent Victorian, Julia Taddeo describes Virginia Woolf experiencing sex/gender euphoria in response to an anecdote of Lytton Strachey’s that turned on a particular male/male sexual escapade. Woolf was vastly well-read, and she belonged to circles that took pride in their sexual outspokenness, yet Strachey’s explicit description of sex between men clearly opened new vistas previously outside the young artist’s ken.

This Woolfian anecdote suggests the two key issues I will explore in this talk: the distinctive conventional license the anecdote affords, and the lack of concepts and vocabulary in patriarchal societies relating to sexual and gendered desires, acts and identities that exclude or “misuse” the penis. James Joyce, I will argue, with his encyclopedic literary inclusion of sex/gender desires and experiences of all kinds, afforded queer AFAB modernists (an anachronistic term I am adopting with impunity since lesbian is also anachronistic, and simultaneously overdetermined in unhelpful ways), drew on the license afforded by the conventions of Irish storytelling to disseminate a huge array of sexual possibilities, and drew the courageous support of many queer intellectuals who found in his literary “stories” the potential for self-invention through their own anecdotes, which formed new, affectively and erotically-bonded counterpublics.

Margot Gayle Backus is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English at the University of Houston. She was 2014-15 Queens University Fulbright Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing, and 2015 James Joyce Scholar in residence at the University of Buffalo. Her books include The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Duke University Press, 1999), Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), and, with Joseph Valente, The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Indiana University Press, 2020).