Reading this page, you are not where you are. I have pulled you into me, because I knew your eye would eventually bring you here. Perhaps all we will ever know of each other is what we now share. So—if two can be one—be me; and I will be you. See through the eyes of someone who has not seen the landscape sprawling beneath the highest height you've ever climbed, or touched the face that most often faces yours. I can't guess why you cry when you cry alone, or where you go when you don't want to be found. Against time, I want to be you, because one life is not enough.

Words are ladders, down which we multiply the pages of our lives. Surrender your eye and live without consequences. For a page, be the person you always wanted to be, but never could; or, be the person you never wanted to be, and, for once, understand why.  Make love as violently as others wage war. Leave your lover for your sister (or your brother). Stand love up at the diner and gun the getaway gas. Forget about sex and sublimate. But whatever you do: Choose your own adventure.

Edward Packard's Choose Your Own Adventure series, whose popularity peaked in this country during the eighties, is generally considered the paperback predecessor to interactive cyberspace. As Packard observed, "Some of those brilliant nerds in Silicon Valley might have gotten some inspiration from some of those books." While Packard's series has served for over two decades as a prominent locus of the nonlinear, intersubjective narrative characterizing much of cyberspace, Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, traces the history of similar such narratives all the way back to the tradition of oral storytelling—wherein the storyteller calibrated both the style and content of narration to the tenor of audience response—through a twentieth century gravitation toward narratives evincing "multiple intersecting points of view" –e.g. Faulkner—and/or  "multiple possible outcomes"—e.g. Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, and Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths." Murray attributes this contemporary trend to "the fact that we see our lives as more open to choice and possibility, less controlled by social convention or by what the Victorians called 'Providence' than human beings have in other eras." One can even attribute to this new sense of freedom the enormous popularity of such cyberspace virtual communities as Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) and the trekkie fascination with the idea of the 24^th century holodeck.

            But what, you might ask, does this have to do with sexuality and/or queer history? As an experiment in queer metahistory, this project is premised on the following hypothesis: Any history which purports to engage queer identity must itself be queer, and in order to write queer history, the historian must venture beyond that linear, singular subjectivity s/he has long inhabited.  It is thus to the nonlinear, intersubjective narratives found in such places as the Choose Your Own Adventure series that I suggest we turn as a means of escaping the predicament in which those of us currently witnessing the "coming out" of traditional history--which before did not embrace queer identity--into an era which insists upon this embrace find ourselves. Suddenly tuned in to a supposedly heretofore-latent "gaydar," today's historian faces a perplexing conundrum: official documentation of queer identity both preceding and including the twentieth century is exceedingly difficult to procure; however, the historian faces this conundrum in the wake of an ever-increasing awareness that, for a variety of reasons, much documentation which once appeared official—and was on this basis ceded status as "traditional history"-- does so no longer, and that the preservation, circulation, and interpretation of such "evidence" has often better reflected present politics than past realities. Thus, the best intentions of such gay liberationist historians as Duberman—who writes that "the history of gay people shows that despite repression, secrecy and shame, we as a people have nonetheless survived.... and therefore this history can provide real inspiration to everyone else to be just as different as they really are"—and D'Emilio—who writes that "...only the conviction that the [gay liberation] movement would be strengthened by the retrieval of its hidden early history kept me at it"—to add official documentation and evidence of queer identity to the snowball of "traditional history" sadly coincide with the melting of this same snowball. To borrow from Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, queer history endeavors to "replenish the gaps of memory" as traditional history begins to "challenge even those memories that have survived intact."

            Which is precisely why queer history must shed the dead weight of an additive model and leap into the foray of the internal disintegration of traditional history, lest we find ourselves working against a Nietzschean sense of history for life—lest we "let the dead bury the living." Now is the time to challenge a body of knowledge riddled with lacunae--even let this body bleed to death--by remembering that we have always experienced this body as irremediably wounded. Those of us possessed of queer identity—and we are capable of self-identification—have long been reading history as a Choose Your Own Adventure series; for some reason, however, many of us forsook our queer understanding of history the moment we became historians.  We forgot our years seated at the feet of the traditional historian, listening to a usually third-person, but occasionally first-person, linear narration which never addressed or engaged "you"; and instead of subverting this paradigm of historiography, we silently bade our time and bit our tongues, waiting for the moment we could oust age-befuddled traditional historians, seize their stools, and force others to the floor as we droned out our own narrations.

            If this project is at all successful, it will remind us how we felt as we fidgeted on the floor--that we once read history queerly, and have thus been always already at once inside and outside the bleeding body of traditional history. We will remember that for every ostensibly documented choice, there were choices that were not and/or could not be made and/or documented; that beneath the weight of every first or third person squirmed a "you"-- a "you" fully capable of mediating both choice and the adventures engendered by that choice.  As with any experiment, the outcome, depending as it does upon a number of variables—here including you--cannot be predicted. With each "The End," you will determine the degree to which form follows function and medium is message. Hopefully, this historiography will leave you feeling cheated even yet of address and engagement, as indeed you are; from no choice to some choice leaves much room for more choice. But perhaps one day we will meet on the holodeck, where you and I will make queer history—as we go.

Begin the adventure.