This chapter considers American gay life writing with an emphasis on drag-performers and/as genderqueer subjects. It aims to lay out historical trends in the understanding of drag as a career and its connection to genderqueer subjectivity, arguing that much of drag and genderqueer life writing eschews rigid ontologies for more unfixed inhabitations of gendered and sexual subjectivities. Autobiographies published between the 1970s and the 1990s tend to treat drag performance as a vocational calling for gay and/or genderqueer individuals. By the 2000s, we see a trend toward memoirs that treat drag as an unserious diversion from normal life. Starting in the 2010s, there is increased emphasis on identity over vocation, reflecting new public interest in understanding genderqueer subjectivity but also increased pressure to define oneself through legible categories. Coeval with such accounts is the emergence of drag superstars propelled to prominence by RuPaul, yielding drag autobiographies for a mainstream market. As this new trend suggests, we may in the mid-2020s be situated at the cusp of a renaissance in drag and genderqueer autobiography.

With its fresh and unprecedented opportunities for sexual involvements and new self-definitions, World War II was a pivotal event in the history of queer Americans. This is especially true of males who experienced the war as young adults, either as civilians or servicemen. Relying on the recollections of fourteen men, this chapter examines the war’s varying impact. Some of these recollections are lengthy portions of full-scale autobiographies, while others are considerably briefer. Some of the men are well known, such as Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Gore Vidal, while others are obscure, such as journalist Ricardo Brown, actor Gordon Heath, and diarist Donald Vining. A few autobiographies, such as Vidal’s Palimpsest and composer Ned Rorem’s Knowing When to Stop, are classics. In contrast, Ricardo Brown’s The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s is ostensibly only an ethnography of a gay bar in St. Paul, Minnesota, through the eyes of one patron, yet it is an essential examination of wartime queer life itself. Analyzed and compared side by side, these fourteen memoirs provide a heretofore unappreciated glimpse of both queer life and the war.

In both his fiction and nonfiction, Edmund White often repeats life events he refers to as “radioactive,” autobiographical moments full of meaning for him and for his readers. At least one critic has seen in these repetitions White’s reluctance to speak in monologue as a singular gay voice. This chapter argues, however, that White uses the repetition of such “radioactive” moments to create an authoritative voice that explores emerging histories and sociologies of gay life in the United States and Europe over the past sixty years. White doesn’t dissolve the distinction between fiction and nonfiction; rather, he uses both in their different contexts to analyze the conditions that have made (at least white, middle-class) gay meaning possible. He repeats his own life experiences to help articulate and legitimize new and emerging discourses of gay living, to help explain for himself, other gay men, and the general population how gay life and thought in the United States constitutes a continuum of social meaning.

The Audubon Society decision was a seminal step toward the protection of Mono Lake, but only the first step – and an uncertain one at best. It required the Water Board to consider Mono’s public trust values before adjudicating new permits, but without specifying how to balance the competing interests at stake. Moreover, it was not the only means by which advocates fought to protect the area. Policy proposals and new litigation added force to the court’s command that the state take its obligation to protect the Mono Basin environment seriously. This chapter addresses the legal, legislative, and political aftermath of Audubon Society. It reviews the creation of the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area and traces the complex CalTrout litigation to protect the Mono Basin creeks. It recounts how the Water Board ultimately implemented all Basin litigation in Decision 1631, the historic legal moment that ensured more water for Mono Lake. Finally, it addresses the brave choices Los Angeles made in response – water conservation decisions that changed the direction of Mono Basin recovery. The chapter closes with an update on the ongoing efforts to protect the Mono Basin and Owens Valley.

This chapter situates trans autobiography in the history of American gay autobiography. I trace an incomplete lineage of popular United States transgender autobiographies from Christine Jorgensen to Janet Mock – a roughly seventy-year chronology. Referring to autobiographies both canonical and lesser-known, I document trends in trans self-narration, consider the ways in which trans autobiographers variably give accounts of what it means to be or to have a gender, and suggest the ways in which the genre of trans autobiography, though calcified around specific notions of medico-juridical legibility, might in fact move beyond the inherently and paradoxically restrictive genre restrictions that seem to inhere in its production. Trans gender autobiography emerged from, I argue, both the medical imperative for narrative accounts of transness and autobiographers’ desires to serve as sources of helpful and hopeful information for trans and non-trans people alike.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

This chapter reviews the reach of public trust principles across the globe and compares them to a competing model of environmental rights, the rights of nature movement. The former affirms public rights to the environment, while the latter confers rights on the environment itself. Both reflect dissatisfaction with the failure of existing laws to ensure environmental stewardship. The rise of such advocacy responds to the missing foundations for environmental law identified in the Introduction, including weak constitutional foundations in the United States. Exploration begins with a review of public trust principles around the world, followed by a whirlwind tour of global rights of nature initiatives. The rights of nature movement provides an unapologetically biocentric alternative to the inherent anthropocentrism of the public trust and more typical environmental laws, which also premise the value of natural resources on their human beneficiaries – yet they are evolving along similar legal pathways. The chapter concludes with comparative analysis of the two approaches, contrasting the underlying ethics that divide them while recognizing the practical characteristics that unite them.

This chapter examines significant gay American travel writers from the nineteenth century to the present who mine the political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of travel writing to interrogate the experience of non-heteronormative life. From Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) to Robert McAlmon’s time in Paris in the 1920s and Edmund White’s landmark account of travel in the US (published in 1980), the chapter traces how experiences of exoticism, exile, and home have conditioned the representation of gay masculinity.

This Introduction frames the volume’s contents by parsing the two closely aligned categories “gay” and “autobiography.” It suggests that the notion of genre is key to unpacking the political and conceptual possibilities and difficulties inherent in these categories. Drawing on social semiotic and pragmatic accounts of genre, according to which genres are important not so much for what they are as for what they do, the Introduction suggests that gay autobiography constitutes a vital resource in which what it means to be gay has been and continues to be negotiated. Relating the emergence of both secular autobiography and gay identity to Foucault’s argument about modern liberal society’s deployment of biopower, the Introduction argues that although gay autobiography characteristically takes the form of a confession that indicates our ensnarement in biopower’s categories, it also importantly acts as a counterdiscursive connection between writers and communities of readers. The Introduction then summarizes the volume’s chapters, indicating the ways in which they engage with these general points of discussion as well as attending to the specificities of their analyses.

Medical autobiographies begin as pseudonymous case histories for medical doctors’ consideration of supposedly pathological conditions, and become accounts of the ways mid-twentieth-century physicians’ psychiatric practices harmed and inhibited, and did not treat or assist, gay, memoir-writing patients. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts then recount their lives and therapeutic practices as living examples, which run contrary to conventional, prevailing professional opinions on homosexuality, and eventually negotiate their professions’ important, redefining turning points of 1969, 1973, and 1992. As a later generation narrates stories of addiction, disease, and physical abuse at family members’ hands, they can commence with the confident assumption of the health of a gay male body.  They can, unlike their predecessors, see homosexuality as the least of their worries. Initially a sign of a psyche gone awry, same-sex sexuality, over the course of five generations, becomes the healthy norm, from which the most recent gay American autobiographers draw their strengths, instead of seeking supposed cures.

The California Supreme Court’s decision to protect Mono Lake provides a paragon example of how the public trust doctrine can serve as an environmental guardian – as well as a story full of intrigue, suspense, and high stakes. One unusual aspect of the story is that two of the most important characters are neither people nor cities, nor even geological formations on the land – they are laws. In the Mono Lake case, advocates invoked the public trust doctrine to protect public law interests in the environmental values of the waterway, defending them against private law claims to the water within it. To understand how these public and private interests came into conflict at Mono Lake – and why they continue to harbor conflict across all arid lands – it is important to understand the legal doctrines that govern different aspects of water governance. For this reason, the book begins with the law – tracing the history of the public trust doctrine from its ancient Roman and English roots to its reception in the United States, and the conflict posed by independently developing doctrines of private water allocation law, especially the prior appropriations doctrine of the American West.

This chapter examines life writing texts created by out gay Black men. These texts – written and cinematic – seek to archive Black gay existence in historical and social contexts that are often threatening. More than just records of life, they question assumed knowledge and the certainty we have about the ideologies that order our lives. For these artists, autobiography, a form of ostensible transparency or showing, is about making transparent destructive ideologies. The chapter is structured around four key themes (sex and sociality, injury and identity, the feminine within, and the power of opacity), each of which identifies a recurring strategy in Black gay art making as well as a narrative mechanism for questioning normativity and revealing the constraints placed on Black gay men’s lives. The discussion centers on the following artists: Samuel Delany, RuPaul, Saeed Jones, and Marlon Riggs.

American gay religious autobiography is positioned at the site of contest between the Puritan tradition that holds that sexual urges are sinful and must be suppressed if one is to achieve godliness and the American celebration of individual liberty that involves a rebellion against tyrannical social forces. In a radical reversal of the model provided by Augustine’s Confessions, gay religious life writers invariably discover that organized religious institutions hinder one’s spiritual development and that the genuinely spiritual life begins when one accepts the need to be true to one’s sexual self.