Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing brings together a diverse array of literary, aesthetic, and cultural artifacts spanning the twentieth century under the rubric of “queer correspondence.” I use “queer correspondence” as an analytical framework that animates two axes of inquiry: on the one hand, it denotes a genre of literary forms characterized by intersubjective relation and address (such as letters, epistolary fiction, and diary); on the other hand, it offers an interpretive methodology, one that is uniquely attuned to the untidiness of interpersonal encounter – the peculiar way in which relational forms interpellate readers across time and space. The transhistorical intervention of Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing is twofold: the project argues that unfinishedness is a key parameter of queer correspondence and charts a range of critical approaches that grapple with this open-endedness. Conceptually, Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing pursues two questions: How is correspondence queer? And how does correspondence make queers of us? Methodologically, the dissertation addresses these questions by assembling an archive of largely epistolary life-writings produced by North American and European LGBTQ+ artists and activists spanning the long twentieth century. Each chapter animates a set of parameters or features of queer correspondence in the context of a specific intimate relationship or lifeworld. Every chapter considers queer correspondent or epistolary materials legible as such – the published letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland’s private correspondences; faxes and open letters created by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). The project also attends to life-writing artifacts that may not be overtly “epistolary” in form but nevertheless engage conventional protocols of letter-writing, and thus may be theorized as surrogate letters, taking the form of published (indeed, bestselling) novels, diary entries, political demonstrations. These actual and surrogate letters may be intimate, private between two, and yet accessible (even addressed) to others; out of their epistolary life-writings, they are formed into archives, narratives, and gardens that will eventually meet with new interlocutors and addressees. In assembling these diverse materials under the rubric of queer correspondence, this dissertation seeks to unyoke the generic construction of correspondence from its expected forms, unspooling address from its conventional coordinates. Beyond epistolary forms and stylistics, queer correspondences instantiate a field liable to be breached by an outside interloper: a third (or fourth) person who casts a shadow over the correspondents’ you and I. Address, Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing maintains, is unfinished business, enduring beyond the specific historical present of its diegesis to hail new addressees across time. By exploring how each epistolary field of the dissertation alternately beckons, summons, assembles, and/or imagines in a tertiary reader, I argue for a renewed attention to address as a critical parameter of queer activism, cultural expression, and communal history and historiography.