The Mono Lake case reached court in the early 1980s, but the crisis that led to the case began almost a century earlier, when the city of Los Angeles first began to run out of water. Moving water to Los Angeles, California’s most populous and economically dynamic city, has been a state priority since the turn of the 20th century. This chapter explores the water struggles that led to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and ultimately to the Mono Lake litigation. It reviews the history of water exports from the Owens Valley in the early 1900s and the devastating effects on the local community and ecology – prompting the decline of its once thriving agricultural economy (and an open rebellion by Owens Valley farmers). It then recounts the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928, which terrified the population and tempered judgements about the safety risks of large-scale water projects near population centers, further prompting water speculation in more remote areas of the state. The sobering loss of life in that infamous disaster testifies to the high stakes involved in managing water scarcity dilemmas that continue to bedevil California and arid regions throughout the world.

This chapter highlights the relationship between celebrity, sexual identity, and a star’s “authenticity” in gay celebrity autobiography. Authenticity is achieved in celebrity autobiographies when the reader perceives they are receiving personal information about a star or, ideally, that the star is participating in this revelation of private details. For gay celebrities, this personal information includes a recounting of the star’s coming out as gay. Coming out is performative and personal; it establishes intimacy with the reader and adheres to expectations for a celebrity’s media-mediated “revelation.” The coming-out story establishes the gay celebrity as vulnerable and relatable to gay readers and allows heterosexual readers to connect to gay subject matter through the revelatory nature of confession. The autobiographical form gives the celebrity control over the coming-out story as he “outs” himself, earmarking the “revelation” as the star “being himself” for his readers, giving them an exclusive that exists outside of the hollow construct of fame. Gay celebrity autobiography represents an inclusive visibility for both the writer and the reader even as the confessional space of the autobiography itself may also be an illusion in which truth and authenticity are queered through the form of the autobiography itself.

This chapter examines two divergent approaches to writing autobiographically about gay Asian American experience. Justin Chin’s autobiographical poetry and personal essays, published in the 1990s and early 2000s, embody the Marxist and anti-identarian tendencies of queer of color critique. His work self-consciously sought to push against the demand for a certain performance of oppression prevalent in a literary marketplace dominated by white appetites. In contrast, the contributors to the first collected volume of queer Asian American writing, Restoried Selves (2004), convey the challenges they have faced according to identarian scripts. In doing so, they slip into the role of the protestant ethnic as theorized by Rey Chow. The final part of the chapter attends to more recent works of gay Asian American autobiography and maps their attempts to avoid representing gay Asian American experience as a legible commodity to a predominantly white, heterosexual audience.

This chapter concludes the book, but the book concludes only midway through the quiet revolution that modern public trust advocacy has engendered. The Mono Lake litigation advanced public trust principles as a source of environmental law – and even environmental rights – highlighting the role of the doctrine in providing needed support for environmental protection amid weak legal foundations. The Conclusion turns to several open questions, including objections that the judicial role the doctrine invites may threaten the constitutional separation of powers. It considers whether trust-rights claims raise the kind of generalized harms that jurisprudential standing limitations are intended to prevent, but also the counterargument that the doctrine is the original “citizen suit” provision of the common law, deputizing private attorneys general to champion diffuse environmental interests that special interests would otherwise dominate. Finally, it considers what the world might look like without public trust governance – visiting parallel stories unfolding at the Great Salt Lake, Dead Sea, Sea of Galilee, and Aral Sea – before returning at last to the ongoing story at Mono Lake itself.