Koestenbaum's work, both in poetry and nonfiction, has explored the social and mental life of American queer intellectuals. His best-known critical book,
The Queen's Throat, is a rigorous exploration of a phenomenon frequently discussed casually but seldom considered from a scholarly viewpoint: the predilection of gay men for opera. Koestenbaum's claim is that opera derives its power from a kind of physical sympathy between singer and audience that has as much to do with desire as with hearing. He says of the act of listening:
- The dance of sound waves on the tympanum, and the sigh I exhale in sympathy with the singer, persuade me that I have a body...if only by analogy, if only a second-best copy of the singer's body. I'm a lemming, imprinted by the soprano, my existence an aftereffect of her crescendo. (42)
Koestenbaum's conclusion is that gay men's affinity for opera tells us as much about opera and its inherent questions about masculinity as it does about homosexuality.
In
Hotel Theory, a critical discussion of the meaning of hotel life, and the aesthetic implications of such isolation, runs concurrently with a fictionalised account of a hotel encounter between Liberace and Lana Turner.