The autobiographical act of coming out was one of the central gestures of US gay liberation. In the late 1960s and 1970s coming out was part of a new defiant way of living homosexuality and promised to transform the social world by showing how gay people were everywhere. Yet, in the period since this time, coming out has tended to be viewed much more suspiciously. For queer theory, coming out is associated with a naïve belief in subjective coherence, stable identity, and liberal personhood, all constructed or produced on the basis of suppressing both social and psychic difference. This chapter challenges this established perspective by foregrounding the wide variety of autobiographical writings in which gay men came out in this period. Far from a step into straightforward coherence, finding identity in these texts is often a fractured and fraught undertaking. The chapter covers a wide range of material, from single-author autobiographies published by mainstream presses to numerous anthologies published by grassroots initiatives. The sheer variety of texts addressed further challenges the singular narrative about coming out that has become established within queer scholarship.

This chapter argues that contemporary memoirs by gay men about transactional sex challenge assumptions that commercial and noncommercial sex divide into separate spheres, and that sex can be cleanly differentiated from other, mundane practices. While these memoirs contain many unambiguous depictions of transactional sex, they also depict moments where transactional arrangements yield intimacies that are far more difficult to categorize. In addition, they raise questions regarding where the “sex” in the sex trade both ends and begins.

This chapter explores the impacts of the Mono Lake case beyond Mono Lake. Its embrace of public trust principles quickly rippled through the California legal system, and then others. The case was cited in state and federal courts. The influence of the decision was felt in legislative, administrative, and even constitutional matters. It drew praise from many scholars but also criticism by property rights advocates, those worried about the constitutional separation of powers, and even environmentalists concerned about the intrusion of property concepts into stewardship. The chapter explores the journey of the Mono Lake doctrine through California and beyond, with special focus on the contrasting paths taken in two neighboring states, Nevada and Idaho. In California, a case protecting the Scott River extended the Mono Lake doctrine to cover even groundwater tributaries of navigable trust resources. Idaho, fearful of the burdens of environmental protection prioritized in California, rejected the majority view of the doctrine as a quasi-constitutional constraint. Nevada, already bound by a quasi-constitutional trust, sought a different approach to preserve appropriative water rights.

Some forty years after the aqueduct first began tapping the Owens Valley, L.A. leaders realized that the city needed still more water. They also realized that there was a wealth of unappropriated water in the next watershed up, just 200 miles further north – the Mono Lake Basin. This chapter explores the extension of the aqueduct to the Mono Basin in 1940 and the acceleration of Mono exports after the second barrel was built in 1970. It begins by introducing the extraordinary features of the Mono Lake ecosystem itself – the trillions of brine shrimp, clouds of alkali flies, and millions of migratory birds that depend on a hypersaline sea – suspended in a high-desert basin marked by dormant volcanism, geothermal activity, and limestone tufa towers rising from calcium laden springs entering Mono’s carbonate-rich waters. It also reviews the human communities of the Basin, including the indigenous Kutzadika’a Paiute and the European settlement that followed the California Gold Rush. Finally, it explores the human and environmental consequences that followed Los Angeles’s acquisition of rights to take water from the Basin, setting the stage for the legal controversy that would follow.

Given the paradoxical media environment for gay athletes and the struggle they face in shaping their own stories, the sports autobiography offers a rich and understudied site to trace the evolution of gay athlete stories in the media. This chapter analyzes five of the most prominent gay athlete autobiographies to date, told over a three-decade time period from 1977 to 2007, to reveal the discourses athletes use to construct their identities surrounding sport, sexuality, athleticism, and identity. The project offers a comparative analysis of the major themes that emerged in gay athlete autobiographies and how these stories were shaped over time and across different cultural and sporting contexts.

This book explores the development of one of our oldest legal principles – the public trust doctrine – which holds that some natural resources are so important to everyone that they cannot belong to anyone, and so the government must protect them for the benefit of all the people. Framing the core public trust principle as a partnership of sovereign obligations and environmental rights, it examines how trust principles fill an important gap in environmental law – and perhaps even constitutional law. The book highlights the epic tale of the fall and rise of Mono Lake – the strange and beautiful Dead Sea of California – and how groundbreaking litigation protecting it became an inflection point in the development of the trust as a tool of environmental law. It explores how the common law doctrine became tasked with protecting environmental interests, and how public trust principles have been instantiated in wider legal frameworks to protect an even broader array of natural resources, including climate stability. The Introduction traces how the doctrine buttresses inherent weaknesses in the foundations of U.S. environmental law, providing needed support for environmental governance.

As environmental devastation in the Mono Basin gathered speed, local resistance gathered force. Scientists who studied the unique geologic and biological resources in the area raised the alarm of impending ecologic collapse. Residents feared for their health and their livelihoods, as water exports eroded the lake at the center of their public lands tourism economy. Gradually, a coalition of locals, students, scientists, birders, fishers, hunters, lawyers, politicians, and government agency staff coalesced around the idea that something had to be done. This chapter explores how that unlikely coalition joined together to mobilize political support for the lake’s preservation, reviewing the origins of the Mono Lake advocacy movement and the strategic legal and political choices they made in laying foundation for the eventual litigation.Volunteers launched a state-wide campaign to “Save Mono Lake,” raising awareness while cultivating relationships with the Angelenos who relied on exported Mono Basin water. The campaign eventually drew inspiration from a good idea, published by a legal scholar and championed by a student who read it in college: the common law public trust doctrine.

American gay military life writing emerged as a discrete literary genre in the last decades of the twentieth century. These memoirs include tales by older men who served in World War II and accounts by younger soldiers who navigated the challenges of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In this chapter, I compare these two cohorts of writers to examine their experiences of institutional life and male bonding in the American forces. Their stories, and their purpose for writing, reveal how the forces shaped sexual and political subjectivities. Gay men from the 1940s used their narratives to document the service of “fairies” and butch men attracted to one another, straight soldiers and commanders who accepted gay personnel despite official policies, and the infinite opportunities for sex and friendship. Servicemen of recent decades tell a different story of protest. Their gay life was lonelier than their ancestors, and their memoirs function as conversion narratives. In “coming out,” they craft a respectable masculine self to demand the right to serve openly. Soldiers in both eras recall experiences of prejudice and resistance in an organization hostile and conducive to sex and love between men.

Focusing on the centerpiece poem of Walt Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass – now a landmark work in the canon of gay literature – this chapter uncovers the paradox at the poem’s core: Seemingly obsessed with courting love and affection toward the poet (the flirtatious lyrical speaker is named “Walt”), it wishes ultimately to deflect such affective tokens not only away from the poet but away from any particular persons. Whitman, the chapter argues, understood conventional erotic love as intense and private but, precisely for those reasons, antidemocratic. He uses an autobiographical feint to transform his readers into indiscriminate lovers fit for democracy, lovers fit for the national orgy of the America we were all promised. His song begins with himself but gradually swells to encompass the entire demos. And, for any reader concluding the poem not having swelled with him, concluding still regarding the poem as autobiographical or a plea for individual love, his instructions are simple: “Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you” – which is to say, “You missed the point; read it again.”

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.