ALH Online Review, Series XXXV 629 © The Author 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment, eds. Scott Herring and Lee Wallace (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 296 pp. Reviewed by Tyler Bradway, State University of New York, Cortland What becomes of queer theory after same-sex marriage? This provocative question inspires Scott Herring and Lee Wallace’s groundbreaking, experimental, and surprisingly moving collection, Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment. The anthology is composed of 11 original essays, a lyrical foreword by E. Patrick Johnson, and a conceptually lush introduction by the coeditors. The contributors hail from a range of disciplines, including literature, sociology, political theory, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, and American studies. As such, the essays vary greatly in method, archive, genre, and tone. Yet they each share a commitment to probing the queerness of longevity in the shadow of marriage equality’s putative success, marked by Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the US Supreme Court decision that recognized the federal rights of same-sex marriage. Of course, the critique of marriage has been a longstanding crux of queer theory’s rejection of homonormativity or efforts to assimilate queerness into state-sanctioned and market-friendly relational forms. Homonormativity embraces so-called inclusion within the nation as a guarantor of social progress. By contrast, queer theory punctures the “cruel optimism” (Berlant) of this liberal fantasy, demonstrating the multifarious ways that movements for inclusion, such as same-sex marriage, perpetuate the exclusions of white supremacy, hetero- and cis-normativity, able-bodiedness, and class exploitation. At the same time, queer theory dreams of belonging otherwise. Queer theorists imagine sex, intimacy, and kinship outside of romance, monogamy, and fidelity, which heteronormativity enshrines as the royal road to social legitimacy. However, at its (often exciting) extremes, queer theory’s critique of normativity seems to demand a full- throated rejection of longevity as such, as in Lee Edelman’s exhortation to fuck the future or Jack Halberstam’s embrace of failure as the essence of queerness. Within such accounts, it can be difficult to imagine ordinary scenes of intimacy and durable attachments as anything other than a betrayal. Based on its title, then, readers may expect that Long Term offers a polemic reply to queer negativity. But Herring and Wallace have a more enticing project in mind—one that learns from queer negativity and yet recognizes that the social contexts of queer life are changing. Despite so many efforts to snuff out queer lives, queerness endures, and it does so, in part, through distinctly queer modes of persistence. As Johnson writes in his foreword, “But for our long-term commitment to care for one another, we would have never survived the hold of the slave ship, the concentration camp, McCarthyism, HIV/AIDS, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, DOMA, and dare I say, Trumpism, although that https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajac288 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/1/629/7049002 by guest on 22 February 2023