The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military.
It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.
Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José
Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal
artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O�Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and
Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke
Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability
to open windows to the future.
In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead
a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto,
part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues
an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.