Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography

Life Writing about Gay Desire

3 1 Life Writing about Gay Desire Telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about who and what we are, what’s happened, and why we’re doing what we’re doing . . . [o]ur self-making stories accumulate over time, even pattern themselves on conventional genres . . . [o]ur very memories fall victims to our self-making stories. Self-making is a narrative art . . . more constrained by memory than fiction is . . . guided by unspoken, implicit cultural models of what selfhood should be. Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life We live the stories we tell; the stories we don’t tell live us. What you don’t allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever’s held to the light “can be changed”— not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. . . . What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us. Mark Doty, Firebird Self, Experience, and Social Change Stories of our lives both reflect and constitute what we call our “self.” As psychologist Jerome Bruner (2002) observes, we strive to maintain a sense of our personal continuity over our lifetime. The very concept of our self is comprised of the story we tell about ourselves and explains our wishes, our feelings, and the meanings we make of our relationships with others. Across the course of life we remake our life story as a result of both expected and unexpected life changes. Unexpected life changes, such as personal or collective adversity, are likely to require that we remake our life story to maintain our sense of personal continuity. Most often, success in overcoming obstacles or surviving catastrophe provides impetus for telling or writing about one’s life. This search for resolution is often presented as a journey resulting in enhanced sense of personal integrity. This effort at remaking a life story is reflected in the personal accounts, for example, of those involved in the Holocaust. Recognizing the significance of telling one’s life story as a means for realizing enhanced personal integrity when struggling with the impact of major adversity, Steven Spielberg used part of the proceeds of his film Schindler’s List to fund a project to record the life stories of those who had experienced the Holocaust firsthand . Thousands of people accepted his offer. Our own life story may be told or may be written. It is as much the act of telling or writing as it is the story itself that is particularly important in maintaining our sense of continuity of self across the course of life. Psychologist Dan McAdams (1990, 2001) has suggested that life stories are concerned with turning points in the writer’s life. For those experiencing the Holocaust, the struggle to stay alive represented an extreme challenge to survival. Remaking one’s life story in the aftermath of this traumatic experience provided survivors with renewed sense of coherence and personal integrity. It should be noted that telling and writing one’s life story represents self-making (Bruner 1990, 2001). Writing the life story is a different genre from the retelling one’s life in an interview or oral history project. In the present study we are concerned with self-life writing. Over the past century there has been particular interest in writing one’s own life story. From Henry James’s account of his confusing childhood, as his father moved the family back and forth between Europe and the United States, to the “Weblog” memoirs posted on the Internet in our own time, writing a memoir is psychologically fulfilling for writer and reader alike. The historian Peter Gay (1995) noted in his study of Victorian society that the social changes accompanying industrialization in the nineteenth century led to a profound sense of social and personal disruption, and required that people make sense of this time of change. Although the Enlightenment had promised that rational thought would resolve all social problems, rationality had not been able to resolve these problems. The result was that people began looking inward, focusing on self and the need to remake one’s story of self and the social world. Sigmund Freud’s emphasis upon introspection and the effort to remake a disrupted life story through collaborative work between analyst and analysand was, perhaps, the ideal type of nineteenth-century solution to feelings of loss of integrity posed by the crisis of technological and social change. Freud’s reports on the lives of...