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
From Publishers Weekly
Stanford University humanities professor Robinson provides thoughtful analyses of 14 "autobiographers, artists and intellectuals, whose chief concern is to describe their love of men," selecting gay men from England, France and the U.S. He focuses on "three issues much on the gay mind of late: identity, masculinity, and solidarity." John Addington Symonds?who "may have been the first homosexual to write an autobiography focused on his erotic life"?and G. Lowes Dickinson shed light on 19th-century gay life and were both concerned with "reconciling their desires with the values of society, values they often shared," writes Robinson. Andre Gide was the first to have his homosexual history published during his lifetime, and Robinson sees in Gide the Gallic tendency to be "philosophical" or "in the thrall of abstraction." Representing American "coming-out" stories are activist Martin Duberman and novelist Paul Monette. Some of Robinson's conclusions are too broad: for example, his contention, expressed in an epilogue, that "black homosexuals may have been spared the Great [Sexual] Repression" that whites endured, sounds, absent elaboration, uncomfortably like the old racist stereotype of blacks as sexual exotics with little intellectual intercession. Even so, Robinson's fluid prose illuminates the lives and texts of these men in a way that doubtless would have pleased them, and it allows his subjects to engage in a literate colloquy across the century.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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