Introduction

There is a widespread belief that queer history works against invisibility. As researchers, we usually start with the illusion that our work consists of going to the archive to illuminate secret stories of people that have transgressed gender and sexual rules. We usually start our research projects convinced that we will shed light on the lives erased by the heterosexual gaze. However, while visiting archives, many researchers find, with surprise, that at least since the 19th century, societies have been obsessively talking and producing knowledge about the shifting human sexual experience in general and with particular emphasis on those lives considered ‘deviated’ by doctors, bureaucrats, and policy makers. Historians then discover that rather than a treasure chest full of secrets, archives are challenging spaces to find the traces of changing sexual practices and imaginaries. The archival documents present pieces of complicated puzzles with which we attempt to formulate histories of sexuality.

From a queer perspective, finding documents is easier than analysing them. Researchers usually feel first a quick excitement when they find hundreds of pages of, for example, doctors writing about sexual lives that they considered abnormal or police reports about men looking for sexual encounters with other men in cities. Nevertheless, after reading the material, historians often feel frustrated about the challenges of working with fragmented material about how political elites and medical professionals imagined sexuality with little attention to the experiences of those people transgressing the rules. Queer and trans lives— I use these identifiers to define the lives of those crossing what were considered the gender and/ or sexual rules of their time— are usually described by others in fragmented documents such as newspaper articles, police reports, or court records. However, as discussed below, the use of contemporary identifiers can be problematic for historical research; creating a temporal colonization. As such, we cannot access queer lives directly. We go to the archive to fish for events that can illuminate their life: an unfortunate encounter with a police officer or the morbid interest of a tabloid journalist (Farge, 2013). Therefore, it is almost impossible to find any trace of their life experiences on their own terms, or the terms that we understand today, which forces us to deal with categories produced in unequal power conditions.