Setting forth the basic premises, methods, and goals of the book, which focuses on queer performance discourses and practices in North America and in European-based cultures, this introduction toggles back and forth between personal observations and rigorous theoretical explanations of what a genealogy is and how it will work here, establishing the tone and texture of the book to follow. It explains the logic of the book’s layout, with its roughly chronological structure from the 1950s to the present but also its recursive looping back and forth as the key concepts are all interrelated; it also lays out how each chapter is structured (defining and historically situating the key terms in each chapter title), and describes the theoretically and politically motivated strategy of interrupting the scholarly genealogy with ruptures of highly personal, interpretative text, which operate as field notes for the study at hand as well as assertively foregrounding works by artists and queers of color to put pressure on the whiteness of the dominant genealogies. The introduction establishes the importance of addressing the concepts of performance and the performative as these relate to the “in between” identifications of the queer—inexorably always intersectionally co-articulated with ethnic, racial, class, national, and other identifications— and of studying these in relation to political and social developments such as the rights movements.