Inherited Slides: Photo(auto)biography

Inherited Slides: Photo(auto)biography Judy Elsley Weber State University Aftermy uncle died ofAIDS in 1994, 1 tried to write abouthis life. Jack was my father's twin brother, a man I knew both very well and not at all. I made copious journal entries while he was sick and dying, especially during the last year when I went back and forth from Utah to California, visiting him. After he died, I sorted and organized his possessions and my memories, cut and pasted my writing, wrote and rewrote his life. Even with my house full ofhis Spode china, Persian rugs, and Waterford glass, Jack evaded me. He was no more present in my writing than he was in the AIDS quilt panel I made for him. I cut up fabric from his own shirts, held together with buttons from those shirts. My writing was as flat as that panel. Defeated, I cut my text into journal entries, fragments of my life and his, going back and forth in time, entered it into a local writing contest under"Adult Personal Essay," and won 2nd prize with a $15 gift certificate from the sponsoring bookstore. I found myselfagreeing with Shari Benstock that, "Every exercise in memory . . . demonstrates the futility and failure oflife writing"(1053). My problem, I realized as I wrestled with Jack's biography, was that so much ofhis life was hidden from me: as a sales rep. for an electronics company in the '60s and '70s, he had never felt safe enough to come out ofthe closet. Only in retirement, when he moved from Chicago —"Ifyou can make it in Chicago," he'd say, "You can make it anywhere"—to Palm Springs, did he finally make open gay alliances, particularly with the local AIDS support group, and drop the pretense ofheterosexuality. For years, he maintained a neutral appearance of heterosexuality for the family, keeping his gay life quite separate, a life that was so "other," I caught only glimpses of it. As his heterosexual niece, his closeted life excluded me, as did his deliberate decision to leave no written records. Trained in literary criticism , I feel most comfortable unraveling meaning when it's packaged in a textual form. Jack's life was marked by its absence of writing. He kept no personal letters, threw out most of his well organized files in the last few months of his life, wrote no memoir. Even his final written text, his will, was inaccessible to me. He set up a trust fund, administered by recently acquired friends in Palm Springs, which sidestepped 19 20Rocky Mountain Review public disclosure. After his death, I wrote to the lawyer asking her where and how his money was being distributed, but met a wall of silence. Like Richard Rodriguez, my uncle was Mr. Secrets, and probably for the same reasons: to keep his gay life hidden. Jack was an intensely private man who made it his business to leave no traces. He "passed" as straight in the 1960s business world, a debonair and handsome bachelor who hadn't met the "right" woman. Women fell for him all the time. As a young woman so did I, playing, I realized much later, an important part in his appearance ofheterosexuality. The first time I came to the States from my native England, in August 1974, Jack took me on a business trip to San Francisco where we stayed at the brand new Hyatt Regency hotel, the very essence of elegance at the time. When we checked in, we found we'd been booked into the same room because we shared the same last name. "No," Jack explained, "this is my niece." The clerk looked up at this fifty-year-old business man with his young companion. 'Tes, sir," he replied with a wink, and put us in adjoining rooms. Jack told this story dozens oftimes over the years. It pleased him that the clerk thought him sufficiently virile to have attracted a woman thirty years his junior, and at the same time, I was unwittingly playing my part as "safe woman." I covered for Jack, providing him with quasi-heterosexual credentials in places where being gay was not acceptable...