Attached and Riveted

In his new book Dances of Time and Tenderness (Nightboat, 2024), the movement artist and historian Julian Carter repeatedly defines the project by what it is not. “This is not a book, it’s a series of swoons.” And: “this is not an autobiography, it’s an analysis of power.” Not memoir, lecture, or confession, but “call to arms,” “lifeline,” “choreographic analysis.” Rifling through and rejecting more familiar categories, Dances rearticulates itself in terms that keep changing. And truly, how could any category contain this work that seems to bend and breathe as we read it?

Dances of Time and Tenderness is Carter’s second book after The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940, an academic monograph published in 2007. Dances fuses Carter’s two fields: history and movement practice. “We stitch patterns with our feet,” the new book begins. “Approach and avoidance, arrival and retreat . . . We move . . . against the flows of normal time.” Melding autobiographical prose with poetry, parables, and performance text, personal history with archival research and gossip, Dances is a hybrid that could be called autotheory. The book fits into a counter-tradition of queer and trans personal writing that emphasizes the communal. I’m thinking of T Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing A Body Moves Through (2019), McKenzie Wark’s Raving (2023), and Robert Glück’s About Ed (2023), as well as New Narrative and its descendants more broadly. Dances is many things, yes, but most consistently it’s a collective history—one that does its thinking by moving.

In seven chapters called “Links,” Carter moves through his connections to shared histories such as the AIDS crisis; the legacy of trans activist Lou Sullivan, who died in 1991; and queer bar culture in Macon, Georgia, where Carter grew up. Dances travels nimbly through time and space, and includes a sequence on the burial structures of the Neolithic era and another on the so-called “passing women” who preceded the era of the FTM. But its heart is in the Bay Area, where Carter has lived for more than three decades, and in the trans, leather, and artistic communities that he’s a part of there.

The book’s seven links come together to form a chain, a structural conceit disclosed early on. A chain connects, Carter tells us; it “exists to the extent that it enacts the connection inherent in each unit’s open structure.” An organizing metaphor, the chain is also a literal object of interest for Carter. In the second chapter, he details the kinds and characteristics of chains, from anchor chains to statement jewelry to erotic restraints, as well as (too briefly, in my view) the role of chains in slavery and incarceration. “Fastening, restraint, traction, ornament: it makes a difference what kind of chain we’re in.” The chain Carter brings us into consists of intimacies, associations, and repetitions—the stuff that makes up history. “I am attached / and riveted,” he writes. He invites us to link up.

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Dances extends an experiment Carter developed in 2016 for a queer archival matchmaking project initiated by the artist E.G. Crichton. In this project, writers, artists, and activists were paired with a specific issue of OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, published between 1988 and 1992. Participants were invited to create “something new and provocative” by approaching the issue as a kind of score. Carter received Issue #11, “Birth of a Queer Nation,” published in late 1991. That issue opens with a series of articles (the most detailed of which was written by the novelist Alexander Chee) covering the anti-assimilationist direct action group that members of ACT UP founded in New York in 1990; chapters in other cities, including San Francisco, followed soon after. Whereas ACT UP focused on AIDS activism, Queer Nation targeted cultural homophobia and promoted queer visibility by plastering public spaces with confrontational stickers, showing up at straight bars to hand out “heterosexual questionnaires,” and staging kiss-ins and other demonstrations.

Though Carter unwrapped the vintage OUT/LOOK “with a thrill of recognition,” his turn through its pages creaked open a dissonant portal. “I remembered Queer Nation as a gloriously polymorphous node where politics met cultural production met the leather underground,” he writes. But as he pored over the magazine, he found the trans and kink communities disconcertingly absent:

I flipped through the pages again, reread the article about the difference between lesbian sex and gay sex, and the one about the jack-off club. Table of contents, contributor . . . nothing looked back at me. I turned it backside front to read it in reverse and only then realized I’d imagined the recognition I’d thought we’d shared.

In an attempt to process this glaring invisibility, he called his friend, the trans scholar and theorist Susan Stryker, who reminded him “there was a reason she’d helped to found Transgender Nation back in the day: the queer nation alone has never been big enough to hold us.”

Carter’s resulting work, “Sex Time Machine for Touching the Trancestors,” was distributed as a zine and reprinted in Transgender Studies Quarterly, which Stryker co-edits. That project involved him recreating Queer Nation stickers and T-shirts, as well as flyers for an imagined jack/jill-off in the GLBT Historical Society Archives and Museum in San Francisco. The material activated a transcestral impulse that led him next to develop the Transgenderational Touch Project, in which Carter paired younger trans people with “dear old queers, the dykes and fags and kinksters who were the big kids in town in 1991, when Lou Sullivan died and OUT/LOOK and Queer Nation and Susan and I were all hot young things in cool scenes.” The goal was to facilitate cross-generational connections through touch: a kind of embodied transmission of history.

That temporal portal has since stayed open, motivating this new book. Dances takes as its starting point the leap between the present and that heady, grief-soaked period in the early 1990s, when Carter had just moved to the Bay Area from Georgia for graduate school, joined Queer Nation, made sex toys for gay leathermen, and helped organize play parties that transgressed gender and sexuality divides—all this in a context pervaded by AIDS. He never met Sullivan, but he met Stryker, Sullivan’s archivist, at a dungeon.

The chain is an apt metaphor for a work in which past and present are so bound: Carter also joins together the various subcultural circles he’s moved through. As someone who “took first form in dyke worlds” but keenly felt his difference—a genderqueer drawn to butches as much as to the drag queens’ dressing room—he writes movingly of the pain of illegibility he experienced in a period characterized by lesbian/trans turf wars. After listening to a tape recording of a 1979 meeting of the San Francisco History Project, he “was as tired as though I’d been listening to my parents fighting over custody.” In Dances, he rejects such divisions in favor of connectedness. He vaults between these communities with grace, in a gorgeous invocation of queer community across genders, orientations, and time.

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Carter’s explorations of historical kinship are determinedly unfaithful to traditional paths of lineage. Some of the intimacies he captures are lived, such as his friendships with Stryker and—adopting the flirty language Sullivan might have used—“juicy youngman Zach” (Ozma, who co-edited We Both Laughed in Pleasure, a selection of Sullivan’s diaries published in 2019). Others are more indirect—such as his connection to Sullivan himself, which he describes as “linked by the carnal love you can find threaded through queer and trans archives”—or even speculative, as is the case with an elegiac section on Elizabeth Davidson, a 25-year-old woman who was fatally shot inside a gay bar in Macon a few years after Carter left Georgia. With little publicly available information about Davidson, Carter ponders possibilities:

I wonder if [her] friends knew her by that name. I wonder whether she graduated high school. I wonder whether her parents were doubly ashamed of her for getting herself murdered in that pervert bar. . . . She was almost my age; it just occurred to me that we could have been at the Pegasus together some night, both jailbait with fake IDs, desperately seeking what we might become.

Throughout, and especially with the less direct connections, Carter raises questions of ownership and entitlement. To what extent can he claim these cultural histories? To what intensities of grief is he entitled? When he writes of AIDS in the early 1980s, he acknowledges that the “story both is and isn’t mine”: he was there, fighting for queer visibility while witness to unfathomable loss, but (he implies) he did not experience much of that loss directly. In a chapter mourning a loved one (“our Darling”) who died during consensual sex with someone else, Carter touches on the concept of “disenfranchised grief”: “what it’s called when we mourn harder than other people think we’re entitled to.” These nods to the politics of writing about collective memory and collective mourning are where Dances could become more complicated and unsettled, but these framings come across as obligatory, almost shallow—raised but then skirted. Perhaps this is the nature of this mode of writing: approach ideas, bop them on their heads, then spin on to the next thing. I felt challenged by Carter’s at-times too-nimble movements, especially as I read Dances back-to-back with Glück’s About Ed, a denser and more profound memorial to a beloved lost to AIDS. Carter’s is a much different project. Still, though he claims intimacy with his forebears, I often felt not the tenderness so much as the tenuousness of the connection.

Carter’s chapter on Sullivan is most successful because he doesn’t raise these questions so much as leap ebulliently into them—doing so playfully without losing complexity or poignance. Though their time in San Francisco overlapped, Carter never met Sullivan. But “this is the book of the generations of Lou,” he declares, and Carter belongs to the line of descendants. Adopting biblical language, he offers a tongue-in-cheek parable of Lou’s lineage, which (as Carter tells it) begins with a lecture that the gay activist and scholar Allan Bérubé gave on “passing women” in 1979:

In San Francisco the tribe of the chroniclers were [founding members of the San Franscisco History Project] Jeffrey [Escoffier], and Allan [Bérubé], and Eric [Garber], and Greg [Pennington], and Willie [Walker]; and with them their sisters Amber [Hollibaugh] and Estelle [Freedman], and the butch called Gayle [Rubin]; these begat Susan [Stryker]. The tribe of the chroniclers walked in the Mission. Allan sang of the generations of Babe [Bean] and of Jean [Bonnet]. Babe begat Jack [Garland] begat Lou [Sullivan]. And Lou sang the song of his fathers.

Lou lived 30 years. Then a great plague come upon the land and many thousands died, and with them Lou who dwelt in San Francisco. The song of Lou passed from him to the children of the tribe of chroniclers: Susan who sang to open gender’s gates, and her children and her children’s children, and also those who guarded the portals.

These became the singers of the generations. And they walked in the Mission thirty years and more.

It was from Bérubé’s lecture that Sullivan first learned about Jack Garland, a trans man who lived in San Francisco during the early 20th century. Soon after, Sullivan embarked on a biography,From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland (1990), which he worked tirelessly to finish and see published before he died. “You could say trans history started then and there,” Carter proposes. Well, one trans history anyway—this one, the book of the generations of Lou.

In charting these historical kinships, Carter invites us into his own genealogy, his various queer lines. Dances is lit up by an intergenerational generosity. He implores younger readers to “pass down our furious legacy.” The context he provides for the AIDS crisis, which haunts the book, will be helpful for some younger readers (his graduate students, for example, who “don’t know shit about AIDS/queer artivism”).

“Younger” and “elder” are relative positions, and Carter dances between them. One of the more touching moments involves a tale he absorbs from his leather daddy Edward, now in his seventies. “Whose story will it be when I begin to carry more of it than he does?” Carter wonders. “Increasingly I feel myself as a repository, a safe deposit, holding his memories for him as he puts them down.” The book becomes a holding place: “Let my memory of his memory fill you.” We become safe deposits in turn.

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My own entrance into this genealogy was, appropriately, through Carter. It was his choreographic analysis of Sean Dorsey’s movement piece Lou in the Transgender Studies Reader 2—co-edited by Stryker (with Aren Z. Aizura)—that introduced me to Sullivan’s life and legacy (and to Carter’s work) 11 years ago. In retrospect, there’s something miraculous-seeming about my learning of Sullivan in that form, perhaps as miraculous as it may have felt to Sullivan, when, after decades of searching for queer transcestors, he learned of Garland at a public slide lecture not far from his house. Neither of these encounters were miracles, of course: Bérubé’s lecture was precisely what Sullivan was interested in, and TSR2 was exactly what I wanted and needed to be reading at the time. What feels miraculous is that, not recognizing anyone’s name back then, I almost skipped over that chapter—but something tugged at me, and I didn’t. I suppose what’s miraculous is not when we find the things we need, but when we know to follow the tug that takes us there. Or: What’s miraculous is that people like Bérubé and Sullivan and Stryker and Carter—and all those who've taken up roles as our custodians of queer and trans history—have left these paths available for us to follow. That’s not a miracle either: that’s work.

I’m trying to get back to movement. As Carter tells it, history is “the lines you make by walking.”

To make a line by walking is to etch a desire line—something that someone else can repeat. He’s referencing a land sculpture by Richard Long, made by walking a straight path through an English meadow and back again—leaving a narrow path through the grass. Carter uses this sculpture as analogy for history-making. History, it turns out, is not about leaving some singular mark, but about forging paths: dragging our bodies through time and making movements that others may follow. With Dances, Carter has forged for us another line.