A History of American Gay Autobiography

David Bergman is the author or editor of at least twenty books. His Gaiety Transfigured (1993) was a selected book of the year by CHOICE and the Gustavis Myers Center for Human Rights. He also has published The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (2004) and The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Post-War American Poetry (2015). He edited Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris (2009) and, for twenty years with Joan Larkin, the book series Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiography. In addition, he has published three full-length volumes of poetry. The most recent is Fortunate Light (2023). Among his recent honors are Passager Poet of the Year (2023), and inclusion in the Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame (2024). Guy Davidson is Professor of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely on the interconnections between literary form, queer sexuality, and consumer capitalism. His most recent book, Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America (Stanford University Press, 2019), won the Australian Universities Heads of English Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2019.

• List of contributors; Introduction: identity, genre, modernity Guy Davidson; Part I. Histories: 1. Democracy in anti-autobiography: Whitman's 'Song of Myself' Rafael Walker; 2. Medical autobiography Adam Sonstegard; 3. Gay autobiography in the interwar years, or what kind of theory of biography does queer theory need? Benjamin Kahan; 4. Self-told stories of 'Comrades of Sorts': queer males and World War II John Ibson; 5. We are everywhere: coming out, autobiography and gay liberation Ben Nichols; 6. Gay literary autobiography and the 1970s Jack Parlett; 7. Repeating one's self: gay life writing and writing gay life in Edmund White's States of Desire, My Lives, and 'Chaos' Nicholas F. Radel; 8. AIDS and autobiography Monica B. Pearl; 9. 'Post-Gay' memoir and autobiography Octavio R. González; Part II. Identities: 10. Gay American travel writing Justin D. Edwards and Churnjeet Mahn; 11. Black gay autobiography GerShun Avilez; 12. Borderline testimonio: 'Gay Latino Autobiography', beyond gender, beyond genre Ricardo L. Ortiz; 13. Gay Asian American Autobiography Kathy Chow; 14. On transgender autobiography R.L. Goldberg; 15. Drag and genderqueer life writing Aaron J. Stone; Part III. Professions: 16. In the sex trade Steven Ruszczycky; 17. Gay celebrity autobiography Sharon Becker; 18. Sport as both a first and last hurdle for inclusion: the evolution of gay athlete autobiographies in America Andrew C. Billings, Leigh Moscowitz and Joshua R. Jackson; 19. Documenters, dissidents, and double lives: gay male life-writing in the American forces Yorick Smaal; 20. Gay religious autobiography Raymond-Jean Frontain.