Abstract
John D’Emilio is that rare thinker and writer able to lay claim not only to having produced influential work but to having had a hand in carving out a whole new field of inquiry. Along with Martin Duberman, another academic, and Jonathan Ned Katz, an independent scholar, D’Emilio established LGBT American history in the early 1980s. Until their work appeared, not only did queer American history dare not speak its name, few outside or even inside the historical profession recognized that American queerness had a history worth the study. A founder of the Gay Academic Union in New York at just 25 in 1973, D’Emilio received his Columbia doctorate in American history in 1982, with his revised dissertation published the very next year. Recording the mid-twentieth-century creation of an organized queer minority in the United States--the history, that is, of the very social movement of which his work was itself an early product—his first book is a foundational document. Subsequent publications include a monumental biography of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a gay man; and a comprehensive history of American sexuality, co-authored with Estelle Freedman. Few entire books by other scholars rival in influence some of D’Emilio’s individual essays. Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood takes D’Emilio from his politically conservative, Italian-American boyhood in the Bronx, through his enrollment at Manhattan’s rigorous Regis High School, then through his undergraduate years at Columbia during the tumult of the late 1960s.
I hope this book is just a first installment of D’Emilio’s consequential life story; yet as a well-told account of young queer manhood at midcentury, it is a treasure unto itself. Like the best histories, there is no sense of inevitable outcome in this memoir. Like D’Emilio’s scholarship, this book has a keen, complex sense of contingency; unlike many queer autobiographies, there is no simplistic notion of precisely “when I knew” regarding the author’s queer identity. Profound in its accessible, engaging plain-spokenness, it will stand with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City as a classic coming-of-age story by a member of an emerging American minority group. The book has the appealing detail of a well-crafted novel: Acting like a historian before he realized he would become one, D’Emilio fortunately saved youthful correspondence with friends, adding those valuable sources to photographs, home movies, and news clippings saved by his mother.
The letters often reflect how much D’Emilio valued male friendships, was nurtured and informed by those associations; and the book is indeed an insightful examination of American masculinity in transition. In their opposition to a war and their open embrace of queerness, young males like D’Emilio promoted a redefinition of American masculinity itself. It was an era of uncovering: Upon telling his conservative parents of his antiwar activism, D’Emilio learned that his own father had not been discharged during World War II because of a bad back, as family lore had it, but because he had attempted suicide in the aftermath of the suicide of his only army buddy.
There are consequential changes in the scenery of a life: from his parents’ Parkchester apartment in the Bronx, once “my world” (p. 47), to Manhattan for both high school and college; from furtive flirtation and tentative touching with male strangers on the subway to actual sexual encounters with other males met while cruising, all described with ethnographic attention to detail. At the memoir’s end, D’Emilio is in the household he established with a male lover when he was in his early twenties, a comparatively rare living arrangement in 1971. “Being high, listening to music, hanging out with friends, having sex: all of it was woven,” D’Emilio writes, “into this life we were creating.” (p. 200)
An intense and brave curiosity, a venturesome spirit both intellectual and physical, enlivens the entire book. He got himself to Europe twice before he was out of college. A serious person of ideas even as a teenager, D’Emilio credits James Baldwin with making him “realize there were men who desired men,” David Hume with making him “question whether God existed,” and Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis, with allowing “me to see my sexual desires in an entirely new light and to imagine a life with integrity.” (pp. 146–147)
D’Emilio is living just such a life when he brings this appealing work to a conclusion, beginning his doctoral work to better understand the society he hopes that his activism will help change. He personifies what his own scholarship has described so well: the transformation in American queerness from largely a matter of clandestine, unfulfilled yearning to an unprecedented openness, full of potential. For all that has been written about American culture at midcentury, John D’Emilio’s achievement is singular. With engaging grace and candor, he has articulated a mood and explained an experience as no one else quite has.
