MAXIMALIST BISEXUAL POET

WRITER & QUEER HISTORIAN.

Ryan Stephen Thornton (he/him) is a poet, performance maker and queer historian based in York, writing maximalist queer life-writing that refuses to sit still or keep its voice down. He is completing a practice-led PhD in Theatre & Performance at York St John University, Queering the Archive: A Poetics of Desirance. The thesis develops flamboyeurial historiography, a method that considers the erotic a way of knowing and moves through the past by desire rather than detachment. Its practice is Nowt So Queer, an audio-led anarchive of 88 sites of York’s queer history across nearly two thousand years.

His debut collection, Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel (2025), was followed by two Verse Traps anthologies, drawn from his annual Pride Month writing challenge. His poems have appeared in Hearth & Coffin, Powders Press, Impostor Journal, Coalition Works, StepAway Magazine, Cape Magazine and Coffin Bell, among others. As a visiting lecturer at York St John University, he has taught performance theory, queer theory and the poetics of failure. He writes on Substack as Poet Chaotique and co-runs the mixed-arts publication MoodMilk with pixiewithpens.

Expect the silly things done seriously, and the serious things done sillily.

He crowned himself the Goblin King of Poetry in 2025, which comes with an annual stipend of a bottle of honey tequila, a VHS copy of Velvet Goldmine, and a decommissioned service revolver repurposed as a cigarette lighter. It's a lifelong position, so to be the next Goblin King of Poetry you will have to best him in a duel. It's a traditional fight to the death with yum-yums at dawn.

He still hasn't mastered brevity, seriousness, and writing in third person, or have I?

Get In Touch

Find the chaos elsewhere too:

https://linktr.ee/RyanStephenThornton

For enquiries, drop me a line:

WRITER & QUEER HISTORIAN.

Find the chaos elsewhere too: https://linktr.ee/RyanStephenThornton For enquiries, drop me a line:

Find the chaos elsewhere too:

https://linktr.ee/RyanStephenThornton

For enquiries, drop me a line:

RYAN STEPHEN THORNTON