This essay contributes to recent scholarship in queer and feminist rhetorical studies that has argued for a formulation of ethos as a rhetorical practice that centers the rhetor's awareness of their subjective, spatial, material interdependence with and accountability to others. My first year writing course, titled "Archiving LGBTQ Lives," became an opportunity to reflect on archival work as a specific context through which we might practice this approach to ethos construction while also considering what it might mean to "queer" ethos. This essay argues that by interrogating the role of the archives in normalizing particular histories and ways of knowing, "Archiving LGBTQ Lives" worked to not only redefine, but to "queer" ethos by asking students to listen to the past in ways that centered their accountability to those who've been historically marginalized along intersecting lines of gender, sexuality, and race, and concludes by offering the scholarly personal narrative as a specific tool for helping students to think critically about their ethical relationship to the work of writing and to knowledge production more generally.