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By Root 1158 0

Before they were “liberated” and given an “identity,” they were everywhere and nowhere. As long as the word homosexual was never pronounced, many boys and men slipped across the border of convention and had homosexual flings and then hurried guiltily back into heterosexuality under cover of obscurity and anonymity. The past saw many more casual experiments in same-sex love than later, when the category was finally clearly labeled and surrounded with the barbed wire of notoriety. It became easier in certain milieus to come out, but at the same time the stakes were higher (especially after the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s). In places like contemporary Greece fewer and fewer men and boys were willing to have sex with another male. Only the highly motivated made it across that barbed-wire fence. I sometimes regret the invention of the category “gay.”

Yet I’m grateful for gay liberation and for gay literature. The depression and guilt that beset me in my teens and twenties subsided after Stonewall, just as the rejection as a writer I experienced in the 1960s slowly gave way to literary acceptance in the 1970s. I’d always wanted to write about being gay, even when I was fifteen and in prep school. My first novel, written just then, was called Dark Currents or alternately The Tower Window and was a coming-out story. I wrote this gay novel before ever reading one (except Death in Venice and Gide’s The Immoralist, and they were far from contemporary—or cheerful). I wrote about my sexual and romantic feelings because they plagued me. I sometimes thought I was desperately bailing water in a sinking boat, and that if I stopped writing, I’d drown. As a result, I felt that the new visibility of gays gave me a chance to be seen, or rather heard. Now I was allowed to publish, which made all the difference to me.

Nevertheless, thirty-five years later, in 2009, I can see what Richard Poirier meant. I’d still say that even if he was right ultimately, we were very much living in the urgent short run. After centuries of oppression we had a sense of community we wanted to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it. In the early days of gay liberation writers had an unprecedented importance (that quickly faded) in their own community; for a short while we were virtually the only visible or audible spokesmen for a whole movement, in those years before AIDS forced political leaders, actors, and athletes to come out.

In the late 1970s I became friends with Michel Foucault, and he and I disagreed about gay identity as well. I never quite understood his position, which struck me as ambiguous. He’d given an early interview to the French gay magazine Gai Pied (which Foucault had named) without letting his name be cited in the article. He was fascinated by gay life, especially sadomasochistic scenes in San Francisco, and never was there a more self-conscious and highly organized subculture than that one. Yet Foucault was very much against identity politics and “the culture of avowal,” by which he meant a culture that thought every individual had a secret, that that secret was sexual, and that by confessing it one had come to terms with one’s essence. He traced the need to avow to the early Christian church, which had been obsessed by evil thoughts even more than evil deeds (the pagan world had worried only about the deeds). I could understand his objections to the Oprah-like emotionality and the revival-meeting “change of heart” so appealing to Americans, but it did seem to me undeniable that “coming out” was still a liberating moment, especially since most gays could “pass” as straight and still did, to their own harm. Yes, it might be wrong to consider one’s sexuality to be the key to one’s identity—and in the ultimate scheme of things perhaps gay identity politics have led to the easy packaging and commodification of our experience, a trivialization of the bacchic rites (“Yeah, I’m a power bottom into domination but not pain, highly verbal, into role-playing of the coach-athlete sort but no scat or blood, please,