Vaporous vows: Queer weather in Claude Hartland's Story of a Life

Drawing upon the critically neglected and earliest known American gay autobiography—Claude Hartland’s Story of a Life (1901)—this chapter argues for the weather as an underappreciated support for queerness. Hartland makes numerous vows to abstain from sexual intercourse with other men, and although he upbraids himself for violating those vows, he also invokes ideas about the atmosphere to explain and partly excuse his transgressions. Weather, in this autobiography, provides a model for mutability and supplies a rhythm to the vicissitudes of desire. Revisiting Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s early ruminations on queer performativity and connecting them to Sedgwick’s later writings on weather and atmosphere, the chapter concludes that of equal importance to the conditions enabling a performative’s success are the conditions that enable its demise and, in doing so, enable a queer person to continue in all their delicious contradictions.