DARK ROOM. Sleaze and the Queer Archive

What if narratives of queer night worlds supplemented more traditional archival research with residues of sleaze, taking the dance floor and that which will almost certainly be discarded, forgotten, trashed, and left behind the moment the night ends as a starting point for speculative thinking about queer livelihoods and pleasures? Indeed, queer nightlife presents a unique avenue to think about queerness and the archive. Sex clubs, illegal raves, and drag shows are just a few examples of a queer nightlife that is particularly rooted in messy, overlooked, ephemeral traces that do not always participate in the narratives of orderliness, categorization, and respectability politics that so often define what items, histories, and stories make it into the archive. Perhaps a more capacious understanding of the archive would be one that includes those dark, unruly, and unlikely sites that trade in voluminous and messy pleasures, fun, and excess. Such an approach might challenge the monotony of the archive, offering a more lively, dynamic portrait of queer worlds.