Koestenbaum, who teaches English at Yale, calls himself “a neat, fussy homosexual: you know the type”-and an “opera queen.” “A love for opera,” he writes, “is a nostalgic emotion and gay people are imagined to be a uniquely and tragically nostalgic population-regressive, committed to dust and souvenirs.” In “The Queen’s Throat,” he adopts the tricky strategy of embracing such stereotypes, identifying with divas and reveling in their “canned” facial expressions representing put-on emotions. (Among the many campy photos he reprints are the ones here, from Yvette Guilbert’s “How to Sing a Song.”) Mainstream culture deems homosexuality unnatural; taking to heart this least naturalistic of art forms because of, not inspite of, its excesses, is a profoundly ironic-and profoundly imaginative-response. Fun, too.
