Dances of Time and Tenderness
A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.
Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith’s forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.”
Julian Carter has been thinking with his body for a very long time. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1890-1940 as well as numerous critical essays exploring how embodied identities are developed, communicated, contested, and lived in cultural productions ranging from vintage public health pamphlets to postmodern dance performance. He teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.