| Sumario: | Billy Budd is replete with invocations of various temporalities. This article brings the tale's 'juggling temporalities' to bear upon the questions of sexuality that the story also addresses and shows that Billy Budd is a searching exploration of (and meditation on) the profound historicity of sexuality. Unfinished and unpublished at the time of Melville's death, the extant manuscript of Billy Budd is a complicated palimpsest of additions and revisions. Reconstructing the genealogy of the manuscript's development reveals that Melville moved the action back in time; made Billy younger; added, at different stages of composition, the characters of Claggart (the 'homosexual in the text,' according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well-known reading) and Captain Vere. But there are several homosexuals in the text, who, although they ostensibly co-exist in one time and place, nevertheless belong to different historical regimes of sexuality.
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