Decisions and Revisions.

FREEMAN, CHRIS

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

by Paul Robinson

University of Chicago Press, 1999. 428 pages, $30.

If you're interested in a "Cliffs Notes" version of some of the most significant gay autobiographies of the last century, then Gay Lives should suffice. It provides synopses of the lives of John Addington Symonds, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Joe Ackerley, Quentin Crisp, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Paul Monette, and a number of others.

Historian Paul Robinson asks two key questions of his autobiographers: what kind of gay life did they lead and how did they write about it? These are compelling questions, and the comparative format of the book is effective on some levels. For example, Isherwood and Spender were longtime friends and both wrote significant autobiographical works, in fictional and nonfictional guises, so a comparison of the ways in which each man told or withheld the truth are fascinating, especially given the profound differences in their lives, with Spender marrying and renouncing his formerly gay life and Isherwood forming a thirty-plus-year relationship with Don Bachardy.

One thing that virtually all of these gay men had in common--though a matter that Robinson does not adequately explore--is that they struggled with anxiety about the connection between their sexual identity and gender behavior. They were all concerned--many were obsessed--with effeminacy, whether they avoided it at all costs (Ackerley) or embraced it entirely (Crisp). In his discussion of Andrew Tobias's The Best Little Boy in the World, Robinson points out that "his humor is of the jock variety, as far removed as imaginable from the arch queenery of Quentin Crisp, and it seeks to convey the message that homosexuality has nothing to do with effeminacy. Here again his strategy resembles Gide's, who, we recall, drew a sharp contrast between his own virile paederasty and the effeminate inversion of Oscar Wilde."

The most disturbing chapter of Robinson's book is the one on Martin Duberman, who, Robinson explains in a longish preamble, taught Robinson at Yale and with whom he has had a rather troubled relationship. He writes: "Martin Duberman is the only figure in this book whom I know personally. Although it has been a fairly distant acquaintance, I have been paying attention to him for nearly four decades now. ... I am ... intensely aware that my feelings about him are highly ambivalent." After worrying that he may be "refighting ancient battles," Robinson says things like, "No matter how convincing we may find his argument that he was profoundly damaged by the foolish certainties of American psychoanalysis, we never escape the suspicion that he was nonetheless a man very much in need of psychiatric help"; and "The analytic explanation of his desires now seems so absurd, and the promise of a cure so cruelly fraudulent, that we are apt to wonder how a man of Duberman's intelligence and education could have been such a dupe." And one last jab featuring unattributed criticism of Duberman's work: "some have found Cures insufferably arrogant and self-promoting, and even a friendly reader might complain that Duberman is excessively fond of quoting his own prose." With such a personal investment as this, Robinson should have considered omitting Duberman from his book.

The second most disturbing section is the Epilogue, in which Robinson offers a baffling apology for what he has just written, a book about white men's lives. He tries to rectify his exclusiveness with a dozen pages about African-American and Latino gay writers. And here he makes outrageous claims--for example, that the "sexual pattern" in autobiographies of Latino writers (Richard Rodriguez, Rudy Galindo, and Jose Zuniga) is full of anxiety and shame grounded in some patriarchal tradition of machismo, in contrast to "the sense of comfort and enjoyment found in the gay autobiographies written by African Americans." Against this claim we have the words of RuPaul's from Let It All Hang Out: "The kids would always tease me about being a sissy and a queer ... but they were never vicious." Of James Baldwin, who gets only a few lines in this book, Robinson writes: "Five of Baldwin's six novels treat gay themes, and, although suffering and repression are always present, with each book the gay characters grow more se lf-confident and less at odds with their society." He follows immediately with a forgiving gesture toward Eldridge Cleaver. Using Henry Louis Gates to back him up, Robinson--with astonishing illogic--writes, "Cleaver's homophobia, like Amiri Baraka's, was an aberrant product of Black Power and the Black Aesthetic movements of the 1960's and fundamentally alien to the larger black literary heritage." I think Robinson will find himself standing alone with this reductive and rosy view of black gay life. One wonders if he's ever read Essex Hemphill or seen Tongues Untied.