The straightest thing about straightness is the way it combs the tangle of human connection into the order of patrilineal bloodlines. Queerness, however, pools its resources to operate through a broader sense of reproduction, one more capacious than that linear discipline of paternity allows. As the recent art show Ephemera as Evidence made clear: from AIDS awareness education to queer theory, pedagogy has been one of the resources with which queerness not only survives, but also reproduces itself.

Last December my professor, mentor, and friend José Esteban Muñoz died unexpectedly. In the months since then, people who knew him and loved him have put together various events and publications. Ephemera as Evidence, on show in June 2014 at La Mama Galleria in New York, was among these tributes. Curated by José’s former students Joshua Lubin-Levy and Ricardo Montez for the contemporary arts organization Visual AIDS, the exhibit took its name from an essay José wrote. Like the essay, it was concerned with the intimacy of pedagogy—those provisional and fleeting acts that testify to, maintain, and perpetuate queer life.

Under the rubric of ephemera, Ephemera as Evidence brought together artists whose work José wrote about over the course of his career, as well as the micro-curatorial projects of several of Montez’s own students, who as part of his undergraduate class at the New School worked with artists from the Visual AIDS registry. Some pieces were easily recognizable as ephemera: ticket stubs, scattered objects, documents, and live performances. Others trafficked in more permanent forms: paintings, drawing, prints, photography, and sculpture. Thinking through the relationships between several pieces in the show, I want to consider José’s influence and the possibility of queer influence in general—that is, the way queerness can act as a force between bodies over time.

On the back wall of the gallery hung large photograph of the late Mario Montez by Conrad Ventur entitled MM #29 (2013). It is one in a longer series of photographs that were part of this younger artist’s sustained engagement with the aging queer icon.

Montez is on a beach in a chestnut wig and red lipstick, gazing sidelong into the distance. One long white-gloved hand rests on the trunk of a palm tree, recalling an old-Hollywood glamor pose. Ventur’s photo of Mario Montez—and indeed, Mario Montez’s self-fashioning of himself as “Mario Montez,” drag performer, Warhol superstar—bore an obvious relation to five works by Jack Smith that hung on the same wall: a blackand white photograph of Smith by Uzi Parnes, a collage from Secret of Rented Island, several mixed media works, and a framed publicity still of the Dominican-born 1940s Hollywood starlet Maria Montez (part of Smith’s prodigious collection of publicity stills)—the so-called “Queen of Technicolor” famous for her portrayal of “Latina seductresses.”

Even if, upon encountering these works, you did not know that Mario Montez and Jack Smith were intimates, you could sense that Smith’s lovingly collected photo of Maria Montez somehow prepared the possibility for a “Mario.” At the same time, Mario found in the actress’s racialized performances a resource, and offers a disidentificatory lens through which to relate to Maria differently—a way both more and less intimately earnest than her celebrity seems to demand. Between these pieces hung a large work by Luke Dowd, which depicted with vivid reds and sharp lines an abstracted close-up of two gemstones on four spray-painted paper panels, which over the duration of the show slowly warped. The refracted logic of these double gems—their mediation between trash and value—crystallizes Smith, Montez, and Ventur’s overlapping worlds of glamor, intimacy, longing, and trash. It traces the circuitous rather than straight relations their works, which travels indirectly, like refraction’s curvature. This is the operation of queer influence: the work of intimacy’s open secret.

On the east wall of the gallery hung three large photographs by Kia Labeija, a young artist in the show and also a student in Montez’s class. Through self-portraiture, she negotiates a maternal inheritance and its loss, specifically her mother’s death. Set in richly textured interior domestic spaces—a deep red bedroom, a pastel bathroom, a couch in front of an overflowing closet—these images ask how, in a broad sense, we can understand a figure in relation to her support. In Kia and Mommy (2014), Labeija lies on her back in a sequined red dress, her arms folded around a picture of her mother; in In My Room (2014), she sits upright and alone on a couch in red underwear, lips slightly parted, looking more naked and vulnerable; in Mourning Sickness (2014), she lies curled on a bathmat in a posture that could be sick with illness, sick with child, or sick with grief, her gesture literalizing an impulse that runs between three works. In a fetal position, she embraces the ground that figures her—not only the tiles, carpet, and domestic space that physically situate her, but also a deep web of reproductive relation that holds her in the present.

In addition to showing her own work, Labeija curated the inclusion of Jessica Whitebread and Anthea Black, with whom she participates in a system of care and support called Tea Time: a community arts project, workshop, and closed meeting space for women living with HIV. Whitebread contributed a teacup with a folded letter tucked beneath it on the saucer (which is what women bring to Tea Time meetings); Black a silkscreen of women, flowers, and teapots entitled EAT ME/DRINK ME/TAKE TEA WITH ME (after Alice Austen). The folded letter next to Whitebread’s teacup looked slightly crumpled, as if it has been covertly passed from hand to hand, its blank surface betraying nothing of its content. It hinted at the type of intimate exchange Black’s silkscreen illustrates: silhouettes of women leaning close together in what could be either an act of conspiracy or an act of embrace. Taken together, Labeija, Whitebread and Black’s works reference not only the biological reproduction that bring us into the world, but also the social, pedagogical, and aesthetic reproduction that maintains us in it. Queerness’s influence is here prefigured by a feminist notion of reproductive labor, which insists that the work of producing a body in the world exceeds the physical act of birth to encompass relational acts maintenance and care. In this feminist understanding, reproduction is a continuous and everyday practice. These reproductive acts—when proximate and tangible—constitute what we might call family or community; at a distance, they become that fluid legacy called influence.

Influence is the capacity to produce effects beyond one’s self. A reproductive impulse, it has been configured as something charged that passes between men: master and student, expert and amateur, prophet and disciple, father and son. It has been the work of so much literary criticism and art history—especially after Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence—to re-cast this homoeroticism as patrimonial inheritance, safely containing it within the strictures of patriarchy. Premised on that fundamentally suspect condition of paternity—what Freud famously described in Moses and Monotheism as “a hypothesis based on an inference and a premise”—“influence” names a mode of propagation possible when the question of relation is unnervingly open. This perceived instability of paternity gives rise to the queer logic of influence, which offers a way of insisting on connection when connection alone doesn’t “count” as solid proof. Even in the age of paternity tests and genomic sequencing, influence continues to describe an ephemerality of relation: both the way it lingers and the way it threatens to disappear.

We often claim influence in order to quell an anxiety about origins. The artist or writer can invoke his influence before the canon like the son his father before the law, each reinforcing the other to maintain the social enclosures of propriety, legitimacy, and inheritance. This patriarchal model of influence has been so important in legitimating “serious work” within the hallowed spheres of cultural production precisely because it is within this sphere that so much can go wrong. Though premised on this linear model of inheritance, aesthetic and critical acts of citation are promiscuously profuse. Art and writing allow you to take names that are not yours, and allow you to take more than one: to create progenitors who are not fathers and inheritors that are not sons. In this sense, aesthetic and critical practices constitute provisional world-making practices, which threaten to trouble that logic of rightful heirs upon which the smooth passage of property and citizenship depend.

Disinherited from the Oedipal drama that sutures the Father to the State, queerness is precisely a space to postulate other worlds of blood relation. It summons different potentials for intimacy that patrilineal discipline attempts to keep at bay. In astrology, influence is an ethereal fluid emitted from the stars. Premised on fluidity, a queer influence takes seriously the submerged connection between “influence” and “influenza,” between distant force and bodily contagion, which both stem from the Latin influere—to inflow. This liquid capacity is a formal property influence shares with queerness. In his work on ephemera, José proposed that queerness functions as what Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”: a “social experience in solution” before it precipitates into semantic form. An astral disease, queer influence is an otherworldy fluid that flows between bodies. It is the run-off of shared acts, of the work we continue to have in common, which overflows our formal roles to pass between us like so many tributary streams. In this sense queer influence bespeaks the possible obscenity and non-propriety of pedagogical relation. It is, as Fred Moten writes in his poem José Muñoz, that curve in your mouth that is the trace of someone else’s speech.

Part of José’s scholarly intervention was to insist that these liquid relations, though inherently fleeting, can be known. We can know queer acts and bodies—whose survival has often depended on secrecy—by the ephemera they leave behind: the traces, debris, gossip, or innuendo that circulate after the fact. In his essay “Ephemera as Evidence: An Introduction to Queer Acts,” José begins with a discussion of a work by Tony Just: a close-up photograph of a toilet bowl in a men’s room known for anonymous sex, which Just has painstakingly and spotlessly cleaned. For José, the pristine bowl and Just’s performance of sanitization and documentation bespeak the difficulty of knowing queerness: of how to know acts that disappear after their completion, which echoes the larger problem of how to know minoritarian histories that are systematically erased. Ephemera let us love what is lost by figuring it as more than simply “loss.” As a mark of disappearance, ephemera are often not legible as “solid” proof in the incriminating eye of the state, nor do they appear as viable knowledge within the academy. But as remnants of an act, they continue to act. In this sense ephemera speak to that central difficulty of survival: how what remains can bear what has disappeared.