Gregory Wazowicz and Christopher Richards recently asked a number of gay writers “what books spoke to them when they were coming out, asserting their identities, or putting a name to their desires.” Jesse Bering’s choice:
George Santayana’s semi-autobiographical The Last Puritan played some role in my decision to kick the closet door off its hinges once and for all. I was about 21, and I’d already come out to my family and some close friends. But I was a sad case—I was living an ascetic scholarly lifestyle and throwing myself into my graduate studies to somehow cultivate the illusion that I was ‘above’ sex. I saw aspects of myself in the character of Oliver Alden (in fact, I even faintly resembled the black-and-white etching of him on the jacket cover). And it really wasn’t a flattering sight. I found it irritating how Oliver was sublimating his obvious homosexuality in lofty philosophical abstractions. Santayana would allude to Oliver’s same-sex desires repeatedly in the narrative, but he refused to come out and say it. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Oliver, just come out already and get some action!’ I found his sexual cowardice—which was in fact a reflection of Santayana’s own—so pathetic and disturbing that it made me reexamine my own erotic austerity.
Related Dish on Christopher Bram’s history of gay literature in America here.
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