What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives… . 

Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”)

The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence… . When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence.

I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them.

I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete, ne'er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen.

And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually–the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness become a kind of shorthand for each other–I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

One day my high school English teacher, Mrs. Noble, gave us a homework assignment: bring in eight lines of our favorite poem and read them in front of the class. Some of the kids and moaned and groaned and said they didn’t have a favorite poem and it sounded “bor-ing.” But I panicked. If I read a poem I loved, it would leave me vulnerable and exposed. And yet, to read eight lines I didn’t care about felt like self-betrayal.

When it was my turn to read the next day, I brought my math book with up to the front of the room. At the beginning of the semester I’d made a cover for the textbook out of a brown grocery bag and copies a poem by Poe across the inside flap.

I cleared my throat and looked at Mrs. Noble. She smiled and nodded at me. I read the first eight lines:

From childhood’s house I have not been
As others were–I have not seen
As others saw–I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.

I tried to read the words in a flat sing-song tone without feeling, so none of the kids would understand what his poem meant to me, but their eyes were already glazed with boredom. I dropped my gaze and walked back to my seat. Mrs. Noble squeezed my arm as I passed, and when I look up I saw she had tears in her eyes. The way she looked at me made me want to cry, too. It was as though she could really see me, and there was no criticism of me in her eyes.