Panic about queerness is on the rise in the US. States are banning drag shows, gender-affirming care and spaces, and comprehensive sexuality education all in the name of America’s youth. What marks these sex panics different from those in the past is the way post-9/11 security logics of risk weave through the ideologies and practices of panic. This results in a future-oriented temporality that works to erase the present experiences of queer youth. How are we to understand the construction of queer youth and their sexualities amidst this “security panic” that labors to anticipate and preempt future uncertainty in the here and now? How do representations of queer youth (sexuality) lay bare the deficiencies of security, the fear of sex panics, and thus challenge security panics in the 21st century?

This book at first argues that contemporary sex panics are best understood as security panics, a discourse and set of practices focused on future uncertainty in need of preemptive action now. Secondly, I contend that this future-oriented temporality of pre-emption ignores the ways queer youth move laterally through the present. This means that rather than adhering to a logic of “growing up,” an adult-oriented security ideology, queer youth are making sideways movements that craft their sexualities through meaningful social relations. I analyze these lateral movements through popular culture narratives of queer youth.

By focusing on popular culture artefacts that focus on queer youth, I aim to unscript the expectations of present sexual and security normativity—to be hetero- or homonormative and to prepare future catastrophe. Doing so draws attention to impromptu moments, moments when things go awry, and the ways the lateral movements of queer youth challenge a future temporality in favor of the present. Weaving multiple disciplines and kinds of analyses together, this book requires us to take seriously queer youth representation and experience as not a telos of growing up, but as formative and meaningful in the here and now.