Queer histories might aim at nothing less than rescuing desire.

In untangling this desire, we unsettle the sedimentary narratives that have obscured its historical usefulness.

Desire Palace

Desire Palace is an archive project. It is not exhaustive or encyclopedic. Its aim is neither revelation nor categorization. Rather, the thesis vignettes are gently negotiated moments of contact where consideration lights briefly on shifting locales--texts, histories, times and places. The central narrative is a love affair between two men in the 1950s. It is a story of desire and absence. What is queer for these men is increasingly normalized in a contemporary context. What is queer for us may not have been in their purview in the least.

During my research, I discovered the subject of my project, the writer William Deveaux Wilson. He wrote the unpublished, melodramatic novel, September Venus, in the early 1950s for his lover, Jack Strouss. I went on to locate Wilson's further manuscript, The Stone Woman, in the Agnes Moorehead Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Further details of the author's life were revealed by the NAMES Project Foundation's archives, where some of my work is currently being accessioned.

In trying to situate Wilson's literary work, I studied the histories of melodrama and found them to be rife with politics and social turmoil. In fact, history itself seemd to be a form of narrative that produced shifting subjectivities. Once I had uncovered enough biographical information on the subjects of my research to begin writing, it occurred to me that I was not only researching history, but also producing it by way of writing a next generation of narrative. This is where my project became epistemological. What is history? How is it constructed and deployed? Can we intervene or redeploy history in meaningful ways? Isn't history itself a kind of culture making? Do the queer elements of my particular research enable these larger questions?

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