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Preface and Acknowledgments This is a book about lives and life stories. It is also a book about the times in which lives are lived. It is particularly a book about the lives of ten men seeking sex with other men who were born across six decades, from the 1930s through the 1980s. Men born before World War II do not like to describe themselves as gay or queer in the manner preferred by gay men in more recent generations. Two of the men whose life stories I discuss wrote accounts of their life as they negotiated adulthood before the advent of the Gay Rights movement. Two writers born after 1970 are still young adults as they write about their life in a time following increasing social acceptance of gay lives and the possibility of gay marriage. Other men in this study have written their memoirs within the past decade and have bene- fited from the social change that has made it possible for them to publish their memoirs by the mainstream press; these men have been influenced as well by a younger generation of self-identified gay men more comfortable with their own sexuality and who have influenced their elders to move beyond their feelings of shame regarding their sexuality (Plummer 1996). My understanding of these lives has been influenced both by my lifelong experience as a gay man and as a social scientist and graduate psychoanalyst . My scholarly work has been informed by the studies of pioneering Harvard psychologists Gordon Allport, who emphasized the importance of studying personal documents such as memoirs in understanding lives, and Henry Murray. Murray and his colleagues coined the term “personology” for that discipline concerned with the study in depth of particular lives over time rather than reducing personality to variables. The contribution of this perspective has been enhanced in the important work by psychologists Amia Lieblich (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber [1998]), Ruthellen Josselson (1996a, 1996b), and Dan McAdams (1990, 2001). Understanding the dynamics of life stories in terms of social and historical change has been fostered by sociologist Glen Elder and his colleagues (Elder 1996; Elder, ix Johnson, and Crosnoe 2003), together with the work of sociologists Ken Plummer (2001) and Dana Rosenfeld (2003), and writer and psychotherapist Doug Sadownick (1996). They have shown that lives of gay men cannot be understood apart from social and historical circumstances. Certainly, for those of us with same-sex desire, there have been dramatic changes in the experience of our own sexuality as a result of the social changes occurring since the postwar period. As a graduate student in clinical psychology, working in a Harvard-affiliated mental health setting, at a time when psychiatry still classified such same-sex attractions as psychopathology , and later coming to terms with my own attraction to other men, I helped to organize an aversive conditioning study in which we attempted to change the sexual orientation of men finding other men attractive as sexual partners (Birk, Huddleston, Miller, and Cohler 1971). When behavioral intervention proved of little value in changing sexual orientation , we turned the study into a support group for these men (Birk, Miller, and Cohler 1971). Andrew Tobias (1998a, 1998b), a 1940s-generation lifewriter , remarks that a number of his fellow Harvard undergraduate friends had taken part in this study (although he incorrectly attributes this project to Irving and Tony Bieber, who were consultants to the study). Born in the decade of the 1930s, historian Martin Duberman (1991c) describes his sense of shame when, as a Yale undergraduate, he furtively cruised the New Haven Green for a man with whom to have sex. His memoir painfully portrays his experience with psychoanalysts who not only viewed his desire for sex and relationships with other men as evidence of mental illness but also attempted to change his sexual orientation. I began my own psychoanalytic education on the cusp of this larger change regarding our understanding of sexual orientation. My analyst, while classically educated in psychoanalysis, shared few of the prejudices besetting Martin Duberman’s analysts. He helped me to recognize and feel comfortable with my desire for intimate relations with other men. Friends have asked me why I should undertake the arduous, lengthy education that psychoanalysis requires. I believe that psychoanalysis provides a unique method for understanding our lives and actions. From Freud to the present, psychoanalysis has been concerned with understanding the meanings that we make of desire, wish, and intention. Psychoanalysis...

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