Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book --- Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns --- and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early 20th century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes.