ABSTRACT
The project I called the desert was always monstrous. It was first a novel, then an improvised ensemble performance, then a poetic novella, years later a dance, until eventually some of its images fed into the solo performance Rite of the Butcher. Each version was different, but most circled around the desert as an image of queerness or what I would now call nonbinary gender and sexuality. The fragments below were written during the ensemble theater version of the desert: a few bits of text, a handful of open-ended scripts, an unfinished letter. In them I feel pulsing a range of questions and needs that still call to be articulated—even if this is likely not how I would write today about queerness, about nonbinary gender, about intersex embodiment, about anger and shame, about beauty and ugliness. 1
