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

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