Telling one's own story has always been central to American gay culture. Yet until now there has been no extensive history of gay American autobiography. This volume provides the first comprehensive study of this crucial genre in all its complexity and diversity. Its lively and insightful analyses of a wealth of gay American autobiographical texts attend both to their historical significance and to the qualities that make them worth reading. Covering works produced over the past 200 years, the book vividly conveys how the identities of same-sex-attracted men have shifted over time and intersected with class, race, ethnicity, and occupation. Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrate how gay life writing has contributed invaluably to the historical struggles against the subordination and persecution of same-sex sexuality and to its establishment as a legitimate form of self-expression.
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Provides the first comprehensive study of the culturally and historically significant field of American gay autobiography.
List of contributors; Introduction: identity, genre, modernity Guy
Davidson; Part I. Histories:
1. Democracy in anti-autobiography: Whitman's
'Song of Myself' Rafael Walker;
2. Medical autobiography Adam Sonstegard;
3.
Gay autobiography in the interwar years, or what kind of theory of biography
does queer theory need? Benjamin Kahan;
4. Self-told stories of 'Comrades of
Sorts': queer males and World War II John Ibson;
5. We are everywhere: coming
out, autobiography and gay liberation Ben Nichols;
6. Gay literary
autobiography and the 1970s Jack Parlett;
7. Repeating one's self: gay life
writing and writing gay life in Edmund White's States of Desire, My Lives,
and 'Chaos' Nicholas F. Radel;
8. AIDS and autobiography Monica B. Pearl;
9.
'Post-Gay' memoir and autobiography Octavio R. González; Part II. Identities:
10. Gay American travel writing Justin D. Edwards and Churnjeet Mahn;
11.
Black gay autobiography GerShun Avilez;
12. Borderline testimonio: 'Gay
Latino Autobiography', beyond gender, beyond genre Ricardo L. Ortiz;
13. Gay
Asian American Autobiography Kathy Chow;
14. On transgender autobiography
R.L. Goldberg;
15. Drag and genderqueer life writing Aaron J. Stone; Part
III. Professions:
16. In the sex trade Steven Ruszczycky;
17. Gay celebrity
autobiography Sharon Becker;
18. Sport as both a first and last hurdle for
inclusion: the evolution of gay athlete autobiographies in America Andrew C.
Billings, Leigh Moscowitz and Joshua R. Jackson;
19. Documenters, dissidents,
and double lives: gay male life-writing in the American forces Yorick Smaal;
20. Gay religious autobiography Raymond-Jean Frontain.
David Bergman is the author or editor of at least twenty books. His Gaiety Transfigured (1993) was a selected book of the year by CHOICE and the Gustavis Myers Center for Human Rights. He also has published The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (2004) and The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Post-War American Poetry (2015). He edited Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris (2009) and, for twenty years with Joan Larkin, the book series Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiography. In addition, he has published three full-length volumes of poetry. The most recent is Fortunate Light (2023). Among his recent honors are Passager Poet of the Year (2023), and inclusion in the Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame (2024). Guy Davidson is Professor of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely on the interconnections between literary form, queer sexuality, and consumer capitalism. His most recent book, Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America (Stanford University Press, 2019), won the Australian Universities Heads of English Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2019.
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