'Anne Vickery...traces how, since the 1980s, periodicals and anthologies have enabled a protean space in which forms of gay and lesbian poetic community have come into being. Historically, queer subcultures have been 'hermetic', lacking an open speaking position within heteronormative society, and Vickery proposes that his place of negativity in relation to the straight world 'may find affinity with poetry's notorious obscurity'. (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction xviii)