Paul Robinson reads the memoirs of French, British, and American gay authors-Andre Gide, Quentin Crisp, and Martin Duberman, among others-through the prism of sexual identity, asking fascinating questions about homosexuality and its relation to literary form. How did these authors discover their sexual identity? Did they embrace it or reject it? How did they express often conflicted desires in their words, which ranged from defiant and brutally frank to ambiguous and abstract? Robinson considers the choices each made-as a man and an author-to accommodate himself to society's homophobia or live in protest against his oppression.
Despite the threads that connect these stories, Gay Lives refutes the notion that there is a typical homosexual "career" by showing that gay men have led wildly dissimilar lives-from the exuberant to the miserable-and that they have found no less dissimilar meanings in those lives.
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