Writing the History of Yourself

On coming out and being a vessel of truth.

I’ve lately been trying to rewrite the story of my life.

Not that I’ve ever actually written it a first time, but we all devise at least a basic narrative to explain our origins, errors, and triumphs. Then, every once in a while, something happens that explodes that narrative and sends us scraping for a new one. When I came out in my thirties, all kinds of narratives became possible that hadn’t been before: pieces I’d forced into different compartments now spilled out and mixed together, and could be reorganized in a million ways. I found myself eager to get reacquainted with previous versions of myself, especially the ones who had lived through crucial turning points and landed me in a life I’d eventually decided to escape. Who had he been? What had he been thinking? What had the previous story of my life—the carefully contrived one that had just shattered—left out?

Since I’m a historian, I’ve inevitably approached my own past with the tools of my profession: first, by seeking the most relevant documentary evidence, the primary sources. Diaries, emails and chats, other writings—in my case, fiction manuscripts—that might testify to the beliefs and state of mind of a person who changed so radically over time that he is nearly a stranger to me now. Primary sources have the incredible power of speaking directly from a time that is dead, a present that no longer exists, and of contradicting the conceptions of it held by the living. The forgetting, the distortions, and in some cases the lies. This is surely the reason historians tend to fetishize them: nothing is as reassuring as finding an answer in black and white.

As I came out to family and friends, I even branched out into spontaneous oral history interviews. As person after person replied, “I’m not surprised,” I started to ask them: what did you know about me that I didn’t, or that I was so able to hide from myself? What do you remember about the guy whose story I’m writing? The thrill of genuine discovery perhaps explains why the enterprise has proven so irresistible: with nothing left to lose, with fascination having replaced the fear that used to spike through me whenever I considered that past, entire fields of self-interpretation opened up that had so far been blocked.

But as in all history-writing, sources present as many complications as they do clarifications. Maybe I now feel this more viscerally than the average historian, because in the extraordinary instance of writing the history of my own life, I was the one who produced most of the sources now to be consulted. I can’t help but be aware that those sources were themselves attempts to fill the void, to impose order and logic on chaos, to shade some areas and allow light to fall on others, to render implausible interpretations legitimate through the force of writing. Diaries from one of the first turning points, in my early twenties, wrestle openly with despondency, confusion, and even depression without ever mentioning their likely source, as if refusing to mention homosexuality in print deprived it of reality. While the testimony of others may be able to counteract my own dissimulation, in some cases those others, too, were in my closet, deceiving themselves the way I did myself. As with all oral history subjects, they are interested parties with their own stories, self-justifications, and reputations to protect.