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Writing
Desire
Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography
Bertram J. Cohler
Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
William L. Andrews, Series Editor
"A fascinating exploration
of how time and place have shaped both the writing and the reading
of six generations of gay men's life stories."
—Henry L. Minton, author of
Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and
Emancipatory Science in America
Exploring nearly sixty years of memoir
and autobiography, Writing Desire examines 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 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance
against Defamation. The artistic works of Tim Miller and Mark
Doty evoke loss and shock during 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
Desire distills the experience of three generations of gay
America.
 Bertram J. Cohler
(1938-2012) was 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.
For more information regarding publicity
and reviews contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734,
email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
Of related interest:
 The
End of Being Known
A Memoir
Michael Klein
"Klein's prose style, like his poetry, is dreamy, allusive, repetitive in that way that admirers term 'hypnotic.'"—Publishers Weekly |
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May 2007
LC: 2006031470 CT
264 pp. 6 x 9
The cloth edition, ISBN 978-0-299-22200-0, is out of print.
"Illuminates the challenges of successive
generations of gay men and also explores more broadly how people
experience, understand, and write about their lives. Empathic
and analytic, it is also a gripping read."
—Ruthellen Josselson, author of The Space between Us |
