Un deseo desmesurado de amistad

How can we speak of friendship, tell the story of that other family, the one we call our chosen family, that allows us to invent new ways of living? The narrator embarks on a search for her past and explores the multiplicity of connections that influence her life. Interspersed with previously unpublished photographs from queer archives, this beautiful and luminous essay is an attempt to express the political power of a relationship essential to the collective —beyond romantic love, desire, and sex— as well as its capacity for reinvention. An overwhelming desire for friendship raises broader questions about lineage: how to construct an alternative genealogy, how to rescue from oblivion the lives that history disdains, and how to inscribe ourselves in a narrative that is no longer merely personal but shared? Because the investigation undertaken here is also directed toward others: “I tell myself that, if we’re going to invent new family histories, it’s best to combine them with others.”