[06/04/24] Carter, Julian: Dances of Time and Tenderness

Nightboat Books, paperback

Publication Date: June 4, 2024

Publisher Marketing: A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch. Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual account of what Julian Carter calls "the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds." With delicate drawings of chains linking the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to medieval catacombs, AIDS funerals, and Tennessee truckstops, Carter proposes intimacy as a technology of history. Here, historians and artists, students and lovers, sailors and skeletons join across deep time in a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality as culture, inviting us to enter a gorgeously complex, formally precise choreography of sweetness, rage and sorrow--"this is not a memoir, it's collective memory."