Queer theory, at least in its elite American form, is in its flop era. Though it emerged in the early 1990s as a scholarly field concerned with the social construction of sexuality and gender, it has drifted very far away from the sex-gender system. It is now deployed mostly in relation to “normativity” in ways that, ironically, promote distressingly banal understandings of what queerness is supposed to look like and what kinds of stories queer histories and theories are supposed to tell. More often than not, it describes navel-gazing autotheory that, misapprehending techniques designed to recover the lives of people written out of literature and archives, instead uses them to describe, often in wretched prose, the lives of affectless professors with mortgages.