Stuff Gay People Like: Planning to write an autobiography

Most high school English texts tackle long-resolved questions. Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet; yes, we know it sucks to be an orphan in 19th-century England, yes we know family feuds are ridiculous. With the novels’ archaic language and way too many words per thought, it’s no wonder American kids grow up to hate books.

The better ones tackle ongoing issues: To Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice And Men or The House on Mango Street, on poverty and class or racial prejudice in America. Reading those is when every gay teenager asks himself, “why isn’t there a book like this about a gay person?”

Thus the seed is planted in a gay teenager’s mind for a lifelong dream: to write the first gay autobiography ever. A masterpiece, which, through steadily-progressing social acceptance – and despite some brief softcore erotic scenes – will join the literary cannon in middle-American high schools.

He’s the one to do it, each gay kid thinks, because he is, after all, pretty much the most interesting person in the world. His story is complex: having a douchebag older brother, nobody recognizing his artistic genius and hating how he gets boners in gym class. There’s that time he cut his thigh on a bicycle gear and the boy he’s secretly in love with used his T-shirt to wipe up the blood, oh! He has this friend who is gluten-intolerant but she ate pizza anyway and was fine. His dad is a Republican – lotsa psychological issues to develop there. One time he got a handjob at scout camp. His life, he figures, is so sublimely mundane that it’s poignant.

He may start right away writing rough drafts of his autobiography in the wee hours of the night, but his vision has an extended timeline. He needs time to get out of the suburban nightmare to hone his craft, so he’ll write his book in college.

Of course he won’t really write it in college – the lure of raunchy college parties and alcohol is too distracting. Besides, he’s a political science major.

Actually, nobody does interesting things in college. College-aged Americans are so obsessed with having interesting experiences that genuine uniqueness only further saturates the tired narrative. There’s a reason popular movies and TV shows notably skip the black hole of college years, featuring high school kids before returning to depict working adults and families. It’s that nobody gives a shit about how you get high all the time or about your scuffle with Fort Lauderdale cops during spring break. Which are the only kinds of things college kids ever want to write about. Seriously.

If he’s particularly ambitious, though, a gay man will have written the first 45 pages of his book by the time he’s 25. That’s when he realizes he doesn’t know a damn thing about getting something published, and that process, whatever it is, is probably boring – so he’ll back-shelve the venture another 15 years.

He may realize by now there are already gay authors. The “coming out story” has long exhausted its novelty, the easier-to-write diary-style autobiographical text he was planning to use now has a preferred format – it’s called a blog, fuck – and a existing gay literature goes back decades, even centuries.

But dreams die hard, and this one is hard to let go of.

By the time a gay man is 35, it’s too late to realize his original vision to write about being a gay teenager – the queer Holden Caulfield, so to speak, except nonfiction. He’s forgotten what it was like to be a kid, so would have to focus on the angsty, lusty period of his late 20s – effectively gay teenagerhood, which is what those who do become writers seem to focus on.

Worst of all, he couldn’t still be all-young-and-cute in his picture on the “about the author” flap. He’d have to either fess up to his receding hairline or creepily use a photo that’s over 10 years old.

“Oh, fuck it,” a gay man finally resigns himself. If anyone wants to know more about his life, they should just friend him on Facebook.

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