ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how words build monuments to queer bodies and lives through story. Stories stand as memorials to experience, relationally grounding people in particular times and places; stories also move them not only emotionally but also in embodied, physical ways. The performance or the movement of monuments—how bodies perform and give substance to monuments, how monuments are relational, how monuments create audiences—is an enactment of memory, futurity, politics and love. For queer people, monument making has powerfully served both impulses and needs, perhaps no less powerfully than in the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in the US. The chapter includes the thousands of ill queer bodies claimed by AIDS and murderous homophobic violence. It also enacts the everyday experience of aging queer bodies as they soften and change but are still no less monuments to the force and heat of life, to a future (still) fueled by desire.
