Warner assumed his position at Yale University in 2007, and became Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American studies in 2008.

He later became a public figure in the gay community for his book The Trouble with Normal, in which Warner contended that queer theory and the ethics of a queer life serve as critiques of existing social and economic structures, not just as critique of heterosexuality and heterosexual society.

Warner has been a permanent fellow of Rutgers University's Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture since 2001, and was a director from 2006 to 2008.

[3] He also sits on a number of Advisory Boards, including that of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (since 1999), the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (since 2003), and the Library of America Colonial Writing Project (since 2005).

[3] Warner is, along with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis,[a] Lauren Berlant, and Judith Butler, considered one of the founders of queer theory.

In The Trouble With Normal, Warner critiques same-sex marriage activism and other moves more generally by the gay rights movement toward equality in normalcy.

The book has been described as a classic of the debates on normalcy as a goal for the gay rights movement, and as an important contribution to queer theory.

[5] Martha Nussbaum, writing in the New Republic, praised the book's moral opposition to "the domination of the 'normal'": "Warner is a deft and thoughtful writer who turns his own experience of the margins into a source of genuine understanding about America and its sexual politics...what Warner's book finally demands of us is...genuine reflection.

In this chapter, Warner looks at the arguments of Georges Canguilhem and Alfred Kinsey to discuss issues with the concept of norms and "The Normalized Movement" within gay rights activism.

Chapter seven, "A Soliloquy 'Lately Spoken at the African Theatre': Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821", considers an historical counterpublic and its context, and the texts that upheld it.