The Wooden Beaver

This body of work is about a parafictional mineral spring located in southwest Virginia, called The Wooden Beaver. I began imagining this site after researching mineral springs located throughout Virginia and West Virginia in the late 19th Century, as well as the history of the bathhouse as a site of queer desire and public sex. Mineral springs began to decline at the end of the 19th Century, coinciding with the Yellow Fever epidemic and the beginnings of modern germ theory. Although most bathhouses that catered to gay clientele were clandestine operations and subject to vice raids, many closed for good in the 1980s during the height of the AIDs epidemic. The Wooden Beaver exists in a timeline where these histories overlap.