As with other subaltern groups, representations of lgbt history have long been a matter of debate: how can we retell our past without falling into the same dead-ends that lead us to oppression? Queer approaches offer fruitful perspectives on this issue; in particular, Halberstam\'s idea of “the art of failure” opposes to the recuperation by high theory of a heroic past that must be recalled, a reappraisal of errors, banalities, and perhaps even forgetting: histories that “seek not to explain, but to involve”. Challenged by 20th-Century events, contemporary Philosophy of History has produced similar notions on how to look at our past: histories that reject traditional closures, encourage a multiplication of interpretations and rewritings, and come to terms with the author\'s involvement in the writing process. Using as a case study the mainstream narrations regarding Argentina\'s Gender Identity Law (2012), this paper aims at recovering the resources offered both by queer perspectives and by philosophy of history, in order to expose the problems of those mainstream narrations, and to think of ways of (re)reading and (re)writing our own \"histories of failure\".