Chicago, 1935
Where desire and damage tell the same lies
A queer literary historical novel
Enter the TrapIn 1935, psychoanalysis is being remade in American institutions. Sex is becoming medicalized and increasingly normalized. Less confession than diagnosis.
Dr. Eleanor Wentworth, London-trained and established at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, has learned that lesson. A woman in authority survives by controlling what others see and suspect. When Eddie Langley enters her consulting room, the Velvet Trap has already made them dangerous to each other.
Eddie brings Catholic shame, a reporter’s ambition, and rituals that make desire bearable. Eleanor brings a lavender marriage and an appetite she has spent a lifetime disciplining. What begins as treatment becomes an intimacy neither can master. The pleasure that consoles also wounds them, and each return makes concealment harder.
Steeped in psychoanalysis, queer secrecy, and Depression-era Chicago, The Velvet Trap is a literary historical novel about a truth that refuses to choose between damage and desire.
Slip down the hidden stairs beneath the Clean Sweep Laundry, and Chicago falls away. Below street level, the Velvet Trap divides itself in two: the Red Room and the Blue Room.
Brass and wood. Red leather and red lights. Perfume and smoke. A turntable gives the room its pulse: Duke Ellington’s Solitude, maybe Billie Holiday's What a Little Moonlight Can Do. Behind the Red Bar is Vivian’s office, where the ledgers tell one story, the whiskey tells another, and real names are never spoken.
Cool lights and blue leather banquettes. Sam is always ready to pour. Behind him hangs a rack of keys for those Vivian trusts. Beyond the door marked “Private” are the Prometheus, the Hades, and the Arcadian: rooms arranged for particular appetites. Across the corridor waits a library of exceptional art and unacceptable books.
Psychoanalyst, doctor, wife. In her Hyde Park office, she helps patients survive what her profession would rather pathologize.
Dangerous. Not cruel. A working-class reporter with a hunger to watch and a taste for restraint. In the Velvet Trap, her compulsion finds its rooms.
Proprietress of the Velvet Trap. The club is only one of her businesses. Secrets are another.
Sweet. Not innocent. With wealth and a taste for risk, she eases between Gold Coast drawing rooms and the hidden world of the Velvet Trap.
Some historical sources use pathologizing or offensive language about
sexuality and gender.
Enter the full archive
Music
The Sound of the Trap
Songs and orchestral works heard, remembered, or implied in the novel.
Censored texts
The Forbidden Library
Censored novels, erotic manuals, and books kept out of plain sight.
Diagnosis & theory
The Case History of Desire
Sexology, psychoanalysis, inversion, neurosis, and perversion.
Visual archive
Bodies & Looking
Paintings, photographs, and images that shape the novel’s gaze.
Religion & punishment
Saints, Shame, and Ritual
Catholic prayer, martyrdom, confession, and the imagination of discipline.
Technology
What Was New and Trending
Life wasn't easy but that didn't stop innovation.
Teresa Wymore writes and illustrates literary, historical, speculative, and queer fiction. As a lesbian writer, she is especially interested in how lesbian desire has been understood, pathologized, and lived within psychoanalytic theory and culture.
Her writing has appeared in print anthologies, including the Lambda Award-winning Lesbian Cowboys: Erotic Adventures, online and small-press venues, and most recently The Contact at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. She also writes a weekly Substack autotheory series Diary of a Psychoanalysis, exploring psychoanalysis, queer life, and her experience in four-day-a-week analysis.
The Velvet Trap is a complete queer literary historical novel currently seeking literary representation.
