Gothic literature has, since its inception, been a genre of complicated, subversive, and difficult desire, one that represents queer and trans experience through metaphors of haunting, monstrosity, and uneasy otherness. In this course, we will examine Gothic literature as a repository of queer history, uncovering narratives of queer existence and its particular anxieties and intimacies in tales of vampires, lingering ghosts, and metamorphoses into animals. We'll move from the late Victorian origins of the Gothic, with fiction by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Machen, to the early twentieth-century queer women's Gothic of Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, and ultimately arrive at a contemporary, explicitly queer Gothic founded in speculative fiction, like the short stories of Carmen Maria Machado and Daisy Johnson. China Miéville wrote, "History can be written of monsters, and in them" -- join us and discover whose history monsters have been writing all along.