When we want to make sense of who we are, we often look to our families to know and understand ourselves. We turn to our childhoods, and to the adults who raised us, to account for the ways we view and experience the world, to fit the puzzle pieces of our lives together, to find answers about who we are. We research family trees and trace ourselves back through the branches of our lineage to unearth the rhizomes of our heritage. We follow our bloodlines like roads that crisscross one another on a map, or like footpaths and trails through the forest of our ancestry. To become familiar with our lineage orients our bodies towards that lineage, locating us in the world. Knowing where and who we come from helps us decipher ourselves and anchors us to other bodies, stories, and lives.

But what happens if our queer identities, bodies, lives, and lineages cannot be traced? What if we cannot follow our queer identities back through a family line—if pieces of us cannot be pinpointed in the pedigrees of our heterosexual family members or accounted for by examining the history of a family that is cisgender? What if our queer stories have been overlooked, deliberately left out, not talked about, or erased by our family of origin and society—our bodies and lives shrouded in secrecy, shame, and fear?

And, what if these fragments could be pieced together one by one, by reading, witnessing, and resonating with the stories of queer others? What if words and imagery could fill in the blanks of one’s queer life and become the scraps of fabric that, when stitched together, create a whole person—a rich, lived life? What if, through story and words, queer people could be brought together in community with others? What if, through story and words, we could be related to one another?

Then, through the sharing of our stories that run in our DNA, my queer loved ones and I—friends, partners, their friends, their partners—and perhaps even you and I, would be kin. Queer storytelling would be an act of constructing a lineage, building family relations, and expressing love. Queer storytelling would thread our narratives together and weave an archive of authored ancestry that we would share with one another, pass down to our descendants like an inheritance that binds us, and locate us in time and place. Queer storytelling would create a queer genealogy—our bloodline, our heritage, our collective history of kinship.