Dances of Time and Tenderness

A powerful account of art and activism during and after the AIDS crisis that hybridizes archive and the personal essay. “Every chain starts with a connection: one link meets another,” Julian Carter writes, theorizing queer intimacy as a technology and texture of history. Dances of Time and Tenderness ranges from Neolithic barrow burials to 1990s San Francisco dungeons in a lyrical performance of what Carter calls “the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds.” Carter’s drawings of chains lace together tales of artists and activists, lovers and political formations, intergenerational lineages of queer thinkers, and trans historians like Lou Sullivan and Susan Stryker. We are invited to situate and resituate ourselves in communal formations–the gay bar, the classroom, the funeral–in a formally rigorous, gorgeously complex dance of rumors and fictions, art criticism, rage and sorrow, and passionately lived experience.