Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography

by Cohler, Bertram J.

• ISBN13: 9780299222048
• ISBN10: 0299222047
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-01
• Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Summary

Exploring nearly sixty years of memoir and autobiography,Writing Desireexamines the changing identity of gay men writing within a historical context. Distinguished scholar and psychoanalyst Bertram J. Cohler has carefully selected a diverse group of ten men, including historians, activists, journalists, poets, performance artists, and bloggers, whose life writing evokes the evolution of gay life in twentieth-century America. By contrasting the personal experience of these disparate writers, Cohler illustrates the social transformations that these men helped shape. Among Cohler's diverse subjects is Alan Helms, whose journey from Indiana to New York's gay society represents the passage of men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, when homosexuality was considered a hidden "disease." The liberating effects of Stonewall's aftermath are chronicled in the life of Arnie Kantrowitz, the prototypical activist for gay rights in the 1970s and the founder the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation. The artistic works of Tim Miller and Mark Doty evoke loss and shock during of the early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Cohler rounds out this collective group portrait by looking at the newest generation of writers in the Internet age via the blog of BrYaN, who did the previously unthinkable: he "outed" himself to millions of people. A compelling mix of social history and personal biography,Writing Desiredistills the experience of three generations of gay America Finalist, LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Foundation

Author Biography

Bertram J. Cohler is the William Rainey Harper Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Cohler has published widely on gay life in America and is coauthor of The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	p. ix
Life Writing about Gay Desire	p. 3
Born in the Thirties: Coming of Age in the Fifties	p. 25
Born in the Forties: Finding a Voice	p. 64
Born in the Fifties: The Gay Revolution	p. 103
Born in the Sixties: Living Easier with Homosexuality	p. 135
Born in the Seventies and Eighties: Postmodern Memoirs	p. 158
Conclusion	p. 215
Bibliography	p. 227
Index	p. 241
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