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.

The vertigo of interpretation is a familiar sensation to historians. The text stretches out to infinity, the quicksand gurgles beneath your feet. We like to pretend the sources settle the questions, but we know that our enterprise is really interpretation all the way down, and that no matter how virtuosic, our account will one day be supplanted by another that will show us to have been merely making moves in the games of our time. The interpretive abyss radiates all the more viscerally when the elusive quarry at its center is not the French Revolution or the Great Divergence, but our own identity. We can, at best, locate some of the major events and turning points in our lives and outline the most obvious factors that might have produced them. But the true cause, the source of the catalytic energy, why in a given moment we did this and not that, may remain a mystery. Countless times, as I’ve undertaken my autohistory, I’ve been driven to wonder if there was really a point to doing so, if the exercise wasn’t a form of narcissism, an unhealthy obsession with my own mind, or even a strategy for avoiding the present by burying my head in the past. History can only tell us so much, and its teachings are complex, ambivalent, and as riddled with uncertainty as the present. Wouldn’t it be better to put all of that energy instead toward the time in front of us?

In many cases, the answer would surely be yes. But even as I spent long years hiding myself, something has always pulled me toward self-interrogation as if it were the potential vehicle of a greater truth. As I came to excel at writing about politics and ideas, in no small part to avoid anything too self-revealing, my natural mode remained psychological and confessional. In spite of how embarrassing they can be and the condescension they often provoke among the cool, I’ve always found the work of radically self-exposing writers electrifying. My entire life, I’ve felt that there was a truth inside of me that it was my mission to communicate to others. I eventually realized that that truth had no predetermined content, that there was no specific message I had for the world, and that whatever shape it took would in some sense be an accident. It wasn’t that I had something to say, but that I knew how to say things: that I could see the edges of, and maybe even learn how to induce, sensations that other people merely swim in.

But here’s the catch: if that was a gift, it might also be a curse. It ultimately didn’t involve any specific thing about me or give me a positive identity. It merely made me into a vessel, and required absolute surrender to truth that came from outside me, from somewhere else, from nowhere. It was, as B.D. McClay wrote recently, inspiration, “something...working itself out through you and coming to be through you. Your job is not to get in the way.”

The origin of the desire to let something come into being through me is one of those historical mysteries. It could be a conviction instilled by evangelicalism, with its charged, individualized connection with God and his “special plan for your life.” But its very early appearance in my life suggests otherwise, maybe just a fluke of personality, or being born under a Leo sun. Who knows. But basically from the time I could walk, anything that stirred me, from marching bands to figure skating to Mary Poppins, had to be studied, reverse-engineered, re-enacted. I always wanted to be watched because I wanted to make other people feel what I felt when I performed. I wanted people to look at me because I thought I could take them somewhere they wouldn’t go on their own, make them see something only I saw.

The eventual surrender to my sexuality was connected to the feeling I had lost my ability to be this sort of vessel of truth, the things I just knew in my bones with no explanation. I’ve come to think of that truth as the Voice, and curiously it spoke loudest and most insistently right around the time I stopped believing in God. I think it perhaps first visited me in the shower, like a ghost manifesting in the streams of water, running over me and rooting me to the tile, holding me captive. It told me that the feelings I had felt for a friend in college—the desperate emotional longing and sizzling lust—that I’d only ever be able to feel those for another man. That everything I had been running from since then was where I would end up again no matter how far I fled. That every other potential version of my life, even if it proved possible to live, would be missing the thing craved most in the world. That I would always know, that I could never escape.

For a long time I succeeded in silencing the Voice; the weight of my experience and beliefs up to that point was enough to help me out-reason it. But it was right that I would always know. I always knew what it had said was there, resting patiently beneath my successful diversions. I was perhaps atypical in that my straight life, though far from optimal, wasn’t fake and wasn’t miserable. But I knew I had surrendered the communion with the truth that so mattered to me, the strange and absurd notion that somehow reality in a higher, purer, or more intense state had chosen me as the means of its expression. That while I might pile up accomplishments, or work, they would never be inspired except negatively, as acts of sublimation-fueled contrivance. What drove me to come out was not ultimately about having sex with men, but about recovering a lost sense of calling that demanded absolute openness, that nothing hidden and false obstruct the way when—or if—truth decided to pour through. One wise friend’s response to my coming out simultaneously made me feel seen and revealed myself to me: “I hope—and expect—that ... you’ll feel the increase of light and strength that always comes of living in the truth, fearlessly.” I suddenly understood why I was jumping off a cliff.

I’m not convinced the world needs to read the history of my life, or my “memoirs” in more common parlance. But the act of writing it, or more broadly of facing the interpretive void at the heart of any life, feels like work I am condemned to undertake in my pursuit of some kind of truth. To comb over and over one’s own life, to shape and reshape it, may be an act of profound narcissism, a form of arrested development, or a strategy of avoidance. I wonder, though, if it isn’t the necessary preparation for something to work itself out through me, the labor that makes inspiration possible. To be open to the possibility of fire from outside, of being able to transform the matter of my own life into something that makes others feel reality in a new way, is to run the risk of falling short, of ending up with nothing but a self that has been endlessly chopped up and rehashed, of landing in lonely solipsism. But maybe it is not the worship of the self but the pursuit of its subsumption in something higher. A sacrifice: a giving up of one’s claim to being sane and respectable, balanced and well-rounded, even a “good person” in the common understanding, to become a vessel for the moment when lighting strikes.