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"Queer Futures" was a follow-up to the panel on LGBTQ Historical Scholarship, as well as an opportunity to remember the contributions of the late José Esteban Muñoz, whose future-oriented scholarship positioned queerness and performance as sites of political possibility. Panelists mapped the strange pasts that shaped their scholarly trajectories, and gestured toward new directions in scholarship and artistic practice. This essay maps queer genealogies that emerged during the panel: the citations of mentors and advisees, the morphing meanings of queer, the fleeting contacts that left deep impressions, the origin stories of research projects, and the evolutions of ideas. The five panelists-E. Patrick Johnson, Omi Osun Joni Jones, Brian Herrera, Sean Metzger, and Clare Croft-offered us itineraries of their current projects, promising a rich and generous future for queer performance scholarship.1
The room was filled with generations of queer performance scholars, and each speaker took a moment to acknowledge mentors and inspirations. Johnson recalled Sharon Bridgeforth's influence on his mixed-media approach to presenting intellectual work, and Croft marked the presence of several of her graduate mentors in the room: Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, and Omi Jones. Metzger not only cited his mentor Sue-Ellen Case, but pointed out two newly minted PhDs from the program he teaches in, Lisa Sloan and Sheila Malone, present in the audience. These citations resonated with me; my dissertation advisor-Johnson-was on the panel, but I am also a product of Dolan's family, as her advisee, Ramón Rivera-Servera, was on my committee. In addition, Muñoz's advisee, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, informally mentored me as a fellow queer person of color through my...