Editors' Introduction

I am here to remember faces I have never seen before And I do -Jewelle Gomez Queer things cannot have straight histories.If queerness proves elusive or unstable in our historical scholarship, then it is little wonder that the archives we wrestle with through this work themselves become volatile under the pressure of the efforts we ask them to sustain.The queer archive is evasive and dynamic.Perhaps it is only fitting that in a catalog of queer archives you can find not only a listing of current gay and lesbian archives around the world but also a listing of those gay and lesbian archives that "no longer exist" and, most bewitchingly, a listing of those archives that "never existed." 1 This makes explicit how the drama of existence is a central, compelling narrative or mystery inhering in queer archives, a drama borne out by countless scholars' efforts to find lost queer things.What Gayle Rubin has called "the missing archive" shadows and structures the queer archival project. 2 Queerness and the archival are structured by their own distinct habitual wranglings with absence and presence.When they are brought together in the formulation "queering archives," each compounds the other's persistent desire to know (to borrow a phrase from Joan Nestle) so that their coupling serves as an overstatement that, through its very insistence, draws attention to the constitution of this desire and the knowledge that is claimed.In this pressurized critical space, the queer and the archival offer conceptual illumination to each other, and it is in this spirit that our work here proceeds.