Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette Book

Paul Robinson's Gay Lives is a comprehensive study of how the gay male memoir evolved over the course of the 20th century. Focusing on writers from Great Britain, France, and the United States, Robinson creates a series of dialogues among his 14 subjects as he examines how each deals with issues such as what it means to be a "man," how to view oneself in relationship to a gay community, and how one deals with having, or claiming, an outsider identity. Quoting at length from writers such as John Addington Symonds (who can be viewed as the father of the modern gay memoir), André Gide, G. Lowes Dickinson (a close friend of E.M. Forster), and contemporary writers including the late Paul Monette and Martin Duberman, Gay Lives is not only a crash course on gay literary history but a meditation on how often gay men (in varying degrees of closetedness) have greatly influenced what we call "mainstream culture." It is perhaps here that Gay Lives is most startling; Robinson both explicitly and implicitly forces us to reexamine how ideas of the personal, the political, and truth shape all writing. Gay Lives is an important--and provocative--addition to the critical literature on life writing. --Michael Bronski Read More

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  • Product Description

    In his autobiography, John Addington Symonds relates a glorious night of passion, in which he and his lover "lay covered from the cold in bed, tasting the honey of softly spoken words and the blossoms of lips pressed on lips." Christopher Isherwood's first autobiography, on the other hand, was far less direct; he wrote a second autobiography in part because the first was "not truly autobiographical" in that "the author conceals important facts about himself." These contradictions, evasions, and explicit sexual details of the life stories of fourteen men form Gay Lives, a revealing account of homosexual autobiography.

    Paul Robinson reads the memoirs of French, British, and American gay authors--André Gide, Quentin Crisp, and Martin Duberman, among others--through the prism of sexual identity, asking fascinating questions about homosexuality and its relation to literary form. How did these authors discover their sexual identity? Did they embrace it or reject it? How did they express often conflicted desires in their words, which ranged from defiant and brutally frank to ambiguous and abstract? Robinson considers the choices each made--as a man and an author--to accommodate himself to society's homophobia or live in protest against his oppression.

    Despite the threads that connect these stories, Gay Lives refutes the notion that there is a typical homosexual "career" by showing that gay men have led wildly dissimilar lives--from the exuberant to the miserable--and that they have found no less dissimilar meanings in those lives.

  • 0226721809
  • 9780226721804
  • P Robinson
  • 11 March 1999
  • Chicago University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 456
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