Hard Copyby Damien Millar (Campaign #256, July 2002) Sometimes, it seems to me, in biography and autobiography, the line between reviewing someone's book and someone's life can seem closer than is comfortable. That makes a reviewer's task both difficult and dangerous. Therefore, if I occasionally seem more cautious, more generous than I usually am to the following material, it's because quite often I'm holding my breath, trying not to fall ill-equipped into the gaps between lives as they are written and lives as they are lived. Naive though it may be, this is an important distinction to remember when responding to books like those selected for this month, even though the lives being written in Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories are (mostly) the authors' own, and the focussed upon life being written in Ian Roberts: Finding Out is (mostly) told by someone else: author Paul Freeman, not Roberts.
The 'Coming Out Story' crystallised as a genre — as a recognisable type of story — sometime between the 1890s with Oscar Wilde's much publicised trial in Britain, and the late 1970s, after the Stonewall riots in America. This has certain effects. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest, for example, that the ideas that — politically, psychoanalytically, literally — saturated this period can also be found reflected in the interests and structuring of coming out stories. For example, in the early twentieth century, the' science' of sexology produced many of the first written coming out stories, and the methods of both their telling and recording reflect the interests of that science. Cut to today. In the sexually-revolutionised, identity-suffused and pop-psychologised climate of now, we often tell coming out stories not only to publicly articulate our same-sexual object choice or 'come out', but also to incorporate that choice into our 'whole lives', to 'come into' a sense of continuous self, to tell a culminative version of our sexual history that ends in a kind of 'truth' about ourselves: 'this important part of my story is gay and so am I.' That's fine. This process of incorporation even seems to work. Most of the time. But. If it does work so well (emotionally, politically) how come we have to come out constantly? Part of the reason is that other people want to tell their own stories about us: the woman on the train who thinks you're carrying flowers for your girlfriend; the boss at work who thinks you might be in love with her. Other people's stories — and probably some of your own — frustrate this sense of wholeness, making you tell (newer) coming out stories. And on it goes. Coming out stories are just stories after all, and as such they will always collide and collude with other story types, for instance history, other forms of auto/biography, perhaps horror, and even — as often happens in Boys Like Us — porn. Coming out therefore is, it has almost become cliched to say, a continual process. And both of this month's books reflect a sense of knowing that continual process. Boys Like Us is a sometimes frustrating and sometimes rewarding
ganglion of 29 authors. The editor, Patrick Merla, asked contributors
"to write personal essays that read like short stories". Some
of the pieces 'succeed' at this level while others do not. The more
interesting do both: Tim Miller's 'How To Grow Fruit', for instance,
or Ed Sikov's 'Chemistry'. Ian Roberts: At one point, for example, Roberts talks about something quite difficult: the complex cultural relationships between differing sexual cultures and sex, Freeman's response is to wax reductively about genetic determinism. This is one of many instances in the book where Roberts (or someone else) talks about hard things in simple language only to have Freeman then state something much more simplistic using what he obviously thinks to be complex language. 'Bad listening' or a 'lack of faith' in his interviewees would be a generous way to frame this typical Freeman response. In one remarkably funny instance, Robert's choice for a personalised "anthem" — the not-particularly-awful song 'People Are People' by Depeche Mode — gets displaced by Freeman's choice, the insipidly petulant Peter Allen song 'Don't Cry Out Loud.' The stories I enjoyed in Boys Like Us worked for me in several different ways: Allan Gurganus' 'He's One, Too' was a life fabulously written; Stephen McCauley's 'Let's Say' was an interesting reversal of the genre's usual telling (he writes it in second-person, not first); and J. D. McClatchy's My Fountain Pen' simply indulged my unbendingly erotic response to stationery. The editor, Merla, should also be congratulated for his intelligent structuring: the stories appear in chronological order, beginning with a story anchored in 1949 and ending with one in 1995. This allows something like a critical context to develop, seemingly by itself, lending an historically and politically instructive texture to the reading process and therefore steering (most) authors away from yawn-inducing didacticism. This makes the coming out story almost seem fresh. Almost. I guess, when we get down to the bones of it, most things about ye olde coming out story are sort-of familiar, and perhaps it is time to at least call into question if not the relevancy of these stories then at least their vitality. Reading both of these books, for instance, I was constantly reminded of just how important issues of class are in this (mostly middle- and upper-middle-class) genre. That's not necessarily a problem; Boys Like Us is for the most part entertaining, but if I have to hear another private schoolboy's angst tale about being different from other chaps (except Toby) I'll puke. Ian Roberts: Finding Out certainly doesn't have this problem. That makes it instantly more interesting and important. And where it excels is in the depth of research and the amount of personal commitment displayed by its author. All credit to Freeman on that count. Besides, it's quite cheap for a hardback, and sometimes things like
that are important. |
Enough
warnings. I want to talk first, generally, about coming out stories
- to describe my own sense of their critical outlines — before
getting into the books. (I'm saying this to highlight how I think and
filter these books so you can make up your own minds.) Let's go.