The late Eve Sedgwick, pictured here at an exhibit of her art in 2003, leaves behind a sizable archive of her pioneering work in queer theory and gender studies. Photograph courtesy Hal Sedgwick

During their nearly forty-year marriage, Hal and Eve Sedgwick almost never lived together. Eve, the pioneering queer theorist and author of “Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire” and “The Epistemology of the Closet,” among many other books, died in 2009. Hal still maintains both of their separate apartments, near Union Square in Manhattan. Hers functions as a kind of archive space, holding everything from her books and manuscripts to her textiles and her stuffed panda-bear collection, almost all lovingly labelled and stored. Sedgwick’s cat, Wabi Sabi, also survives her, and lives in the apartment, too.

For Hal, the aims of the archive are simple. “I want Eve’s work to continue to be available. I can’t predict who will benefit from it, who will make use of it, or what they will do with it. But I know that there is enormous generative power in her work, and I don’t want that ever to be lost.” Sedgwick’s archive will remain with Hal until he finds an institutional home for it.

In the meantime, critics are engaging with Sedgwick’s work in other ways. There have been special issues of academic journals devoted to her legacy, and conferences commemorating her many important publications. Hal showed me around Eve’s archives the day after the most recent of these conferences, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of “Between Men,” a groundbreaking book that popularized the term “homosocial.” At the conference, Jennifer Crewe, the president of Columbia University Press, recalled how typists working on it constantly rendered the word as “homosexual” because of just how unusual the term was in 1985.

“Between Men” not only put Sedgwick on the map as a queer theorist, it helped to establish the field of queer literary analysis. Sedgwick became, as Rolling Stone once put it, “the soft-spoken queen of the constructionists.” (A speaker at the conference noted the shocking disjunction between Sedgwick’s quiet speaking voice and the bold statements she made in print.) The book was published during a heated period of the gay liberation movement; as Wayne Koestenbaum notes in his forward to a new edition, the H.I.V. retrovirus had been isolated a year before, and ACT UP was formed just two years afterward.

It was also a precarious period in Sedgwick’s professional life, when she was moving among short-term academic appointments. “Eve had been at several jobs before she got tenure and it was risky for her to write the book she did,” Cathy Davidson, a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, remarked at the conference. During an unsuccessful job interview at Harvard, Sedgwick was advised that, since everyone only had “one good book” in them, and this was clearly Sedgwick’s, she should save “Between Men” for later publication. Sedgwick said she wouldn’t wait, because she wanted the book to be useful. And it was: “Between Men” has continued to sell since its first release. Ultimately, Sedgwick was offered a faculty position, with tenure, at Amherst College—nine years, and more than a hundred job applications, after filing her dissertation.

Sedgwick infamously encountered detractors throughout her career: academics and journalists, conservatives and liberals, gays and straights. At the “Between Men” conference, Katie Kent described an incident at the third annual Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Yale, in 1989, where Sedgwick presented a paper. Audience members shouted out repeatedly, “Are you a lesbian?” One attendee said that the audience was so disruptive that Sedgwick was forced at several moments to stop reading her paper.

Critics continually asked Sedgwick to account for herself not on her own capacious terms but on theirs. “She was praised, but she was also criticized from every side—feminists who didn’t know why she was talking about men, gay men who didn’t like her feminism, lesbians who scorned her for being married,” Davidson said. “It’s easy to lionize and forget what courage goes into that kind of lionization. That’s what made her brave and prolific and wonderful and a Buddhist and inspiring and a teacher.”

The inspiration that Sedgwick’s readers continue to find in her writing has much to do with her capacity to get personal, sometimes confessional, even in an academic context. In “A Dialogue on Love,” an autobiographical blend of prose and poetry documenting her years of psychotherapy following her breast-cancer diagnosis, she describes her sex life in detail. Her essay “A Poem Is Being Written” begins with “a claim for respectful attention to the intellectual and artistic life of a nine-year-old child, Eve Kosofsky,” and moves on to consider her teen-age depression. These moments in her work seem to enable readers to pursue their own emotional and intellectual passions. “Obsessions,” Sedgwick writes in her 1992 preface to “Between Men,” “are the most durable form of intellectual capital.”

Another word for obsessions might simply be love. Hal Sedgwick made considerable contributions to the planning of the conference, but his name, I noticed, was nowhere on the program. “Hal is not a loud or conspicuous person,” Davidson told me over the phone, “but he is entirely present intellectually.” Like Eve, Hal is soft-spoken; when I turned on a tape recorder, as we talked at her apartment on the day after the conference, he became even more so. In an e-mail after our meeting, he tried to explain why. “I was surprised at the effect it created for me—a sort of internal feedback loop like what happens when someone’s voice is played back to them with a couple of hundred millisecond delay while they’re trying to talk—it trips them up so that they have to speak very slowly and think about each word.”

Hal first encountered Eve through her writing, when she applied to a six-week summer program at Cornell for high-school students. Hal was part of the admissions committee. “Her writing was amazing,” Hal recalled. “It made a big impression on me.” She was fifteen; he was a junior at Cornell. “Of course, of course she was admitted,” he said. They met that summer, and became closer friends a year later when she enrolled at Cornell herself. The night Eve turned eighteen—then the legal drinking age in New York—Hal waited in the dorm lobby, hoping she’d want to celebrate at the college bar. A few of her friends had the same idea, and he joined them when they took her to the bar. Then, “after a few drinks, Eve sort of noticed me,” he remembers. They were married a year later.

By then, Hal was a graduate student in experimental psychology and visual perception, living in the attic of a farmhouse outside of Ithaca that belonged to his professor, the A.I. scientist Frank Rosenblatt. Eve joined him there for the next two years. Then Hal left for a postdoc in New York City, where he has lived in the same studio apartment ever since, and she left for graduate school in New Haven. For more than twenty-five years, while she completed a Ph.D. at Yale and held various academic positions up and down the East Coast, they commuted, mostly alternating weekends to visit each other. When Sedgwick was found to have metastatic breast cancer, they decided that they needed to be closer to each other. She moved to the CUNY Graduate Center, but they continued to maintain separate living spaces.