This special issue seeks to intervene in the influx of writing and exhibitions on queer art in Britain over the last decade. Many different histories and different timelines have been constructed through these projects, yet in several the 1980s, a period of queer culture and politics shaped by Section 28, the HIV/AIDS crisis and the consolidation of neoliberalism, constitutes a touchstone that connects the recent past with the political struggles of the present. Over the last ten or so years, landmark survey exhibitions such as Queer British Art 1861–1967 (Tate Britain, 2017), Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender & Identity (Walker Art Gallery, 2017), and more recently Women in Revolt (Tate Britain, National Galleries of Scotland, Whitworth Art Gallery, 2023–25) have marked a new period of visibility for queer artistic production in Britain, even as artists and scholars have critiqued the imperative to be visible and advocated for practices and histories that resist “queer” as an institutional interpellation. Alongside these larger exhibitions, a broader queer revival of interest in and reappraisal of historic canons and works of art from this period is taking place. Projects like these demonstrate how the ongoing project of assembling a history of queer art in Britain—both before and since the 1980s—has necessitated creating a critical context through which artists and practices can be positioned and understood. It is to this developing critical context that this special issue, and the articles and responses within it, makes its contribution. An animating impulse for this special issue is frustration with the dominance and deployment of histories of queer practice and models of queer theory and politics developed in scholarship produced in and focusing on the United States. Our interest as editors in the potential of art and art history in Britain to challenge such cultural imperialism and reinvigorate queer thought stems not from a parochial or nationalistic desire to centre British art therein. Many of the contributions to this special issue foreground the divided, decentred, and devolved nature of artistic, political, and intellectual debates and practices in “Britain” since the 1980s rather than any national unity. This heterogeneity is what we believe a return to the critical contexts of the 1980s offers.