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LGBTQ Literature: The Death of a Book (And the Rebirth of a Person) [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-30  

LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.

My idea for this year’s Pride Month edition of LGBTQ Literature is different than what I usually write for this series. As somebody who regularly consumes and teaches LGBTQ history, I often write about new queer history monographs. Another way to put it is that my diaries for this series often showcase the birth of a new LGBTQ history book. But today, I want to write about the death of a book. It’s a dignified death, so this isn’t a sad story (quite the opposite, in fact). Indeed, this marks a kind of personal rebirth, which makes it that much more appropriate for Pride Month.

At the outset, I feel that it’s necessary to give a few warnings about this diary:

First, the most important warning: This diary will talk about relationship abuse, including narcissistic abuse and topics adjacent to domestic violence. If that is a trigger for you, please tread carefully. This diary is (as I said above) about the death of a book, and I promise I haven’t forgotten that, but it’s also about a lot of other things. It might seem as though this diary is all over the place, but that is because there are so many interconnected pieces to this story. This is going to be a long diary, but to make it more manageable, I am dividing it into chapters. Daily Kos is much more than a Democratic blog to me—it is my online family. It might seem that I am oversharing a bit in this diary, and perhaps I am. Please know that I am comfortable sharing whatever I share here. Indeed, writing this diary is intended to be therapeutic, an attempt to connect (in writing) all the dots I’ve been connecting in my head lately. If you’re not comfortable with reading some of the more intimate details of my life, again, maybe tread carefully in this diary.

With those warnings out of the way—and if you’re still with me—it is probably best to start at the beginning.

Chapter 1: Finding History

I have not always wanted to be a historian. On the first day of class, I often tell my students a true story about myself: In high school, on the first day of my AP U.S. History class, the teacher distributed and went over the syllabus, which indicated that it would be the most reading-intensive and academically rigorous class I’d ever taken up to that point. At the end of class, he asked if—after going over the syllabus—anybody needed to be excused to go change their schedule. I was among a handful of students to raise my hand and eventually drop the class. So, no, “historian” was not on my list of potential careers when I was young and envisioning the rest of my life.

My general dislike of and/or disinterest in history continued well into my college years. After changing my major a few times, I finally settled on political science. I was a political junkie, but I wasn’t just interested in the political news—I wanted to know how the sausage was made. I happened to accumulate enough history credits along the way that I added a history minor, but again, not out of any particular interest in history as a subject. Then, when I was a senior, I faced a dilemma: I needed to take a senior seminar, but the political science senior seminar was only offered every other year, and I’d missed the previous year’s. This left me with no choice but to take the history senior seminar, which required me to write a senior thesis on a historical topic of my choice. By that point, I’d come out as gay, both to myself and to my family and friends. I decided that, if I had to take this seminar and write this thesis, I wanted to actually learn something useful about my community. The topic I eventually settled on was a kind of comparative study of the modern gay rights movement and the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement. It was the experience of writing that thesis that first sparked a real interest in history as a field. I was first drawn to the study of history not for its own sake, but rather as a tool of activism. I learned so much about the history of my community that I’d never been taught, and it struck me that the absence of LGBTQ history in schools was an injustice. It was that semester that I began applying to grad schools, and I scrapped my plans to apply for political science programs. Instead, I applied to a range of history programs with the goal of becoming an LGBTQ historian. This was not just a personal decision—it was a political decision, as I saw my eventual work as a historian as being connected to my political activism.

I applied to several history programs, and I was accepted to most of them. Only one, however, offered me funding—and it happened to be the program at the very bottom of my list, a program that would require me to move from my home in Pennsylvania to Texas, a state I barely knew anything about. In the summer of 2011, I loaded up my rusted-out Ford Taurus and drove to Houston. I would spend the next five years in an expedited B.A.-to-Ph.D. program learning about twentieth-century U.S. political history and digging into LGBTQ history as a subfield.

It seemed as though I’d traded one life for a completely new one. I come from a working-class rural Pennsylvania family, and I grew up poor and completely ignorant of anything academic. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college, and I quickly discovered that I knew nothing about what we in education now call the “hidden curriculum”: how to email professors, how to navigate academic relationships, how to network, all the quirky norms of academic life. But I learned, and grad school became my new life. I learned how to “gut” books, how to identify thesis statements, how to identify a book’s methodology, and how to discuss all of these things in a seminar (although that part was always hard for an introvert like me). The first conference I presented at was the American Historical Association annual meeting, which is just about the most intimidating “first conference” one could be accepted to. Despite developing Bell’s palsy the week before I presented, I successfully presented my paper while wearing an eyepatch. The way I did things in academia always seemed to be a bit clunkier and more awkward than the way my peers did things. But that was okay. Aside from one A- (something I’m still bitter about to this day, but that’s a story for another time), I sailed through my grad seminars and continually exceeded all expectations. I passed my comprehensive exams with distinction, and soon after, I received my M.A. (which was the second most anticlimactic degree I’ve received, second only to the Ph.D. I would eventually earn).

What I really struggled with was finding a topic that would become my dissertation. Despite choosing a relatively young subfield, finding a unique contribution to make was not easy. I was constrained in large part by finances, since I did not come from wealth and relied entirely on what little funding I could secure from my department and external sources. Although I was not exactly enthused (at first) with researching a Texas-specific topic, it seemed like that would be the wisest path to take. But what topic? I went to a local LGBTQ archive, which at the time was housed in the Metropolitan Community Church, with very little sense of direction. I just started going through boxes, hoping something would jump out at me and give me inspiration. This became a near-daily ritual, much to the delight of the archivist, a gay elder Houstonian who taught me much of what I know about the history of Houston’s queer community. He guided me to the collection of gay publications kept at the archive, ranging from local gay newspapers to statewide gay magazines. I fell in love with “doing” history as I flipped through those pages. At times, I forgot I was there for a specific purpose, and instead I got lost in the stories of gay bar raids and community protests and AIDS activism…and violence. And violence. And more violence. Murdered gay men, community vigils, activists pressuring legislators in Austin to do something about the hate crime epidemic. Maybe I was on to something here. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know the status of hate crime legislation in Texas, and it shocked me to discover that not only does Texas have a hate crime law, but sexual orientation (or, rather, “sexual preference”—that’s a whole side story) was included. And Governor Rick Perry signed it! Just how in the hell did that happen? All of a sudden, I had a research question. I had a dissertation topic. I would spend the next few years unraveling the story. (This diary isn’t about that story, although I can write more about it at another time if there is interest.)

In April 2016, I passed my dissertation defense with distinction. The next month, I was hooded by my advisor and I became “Dr.” My father had passed away before I graduated high school, but my mother was so proud of me, even if she didn’t really understand my topic or why I chose it. My boyfriend Louis was the only “kin” who was able to physically attend my ceremony, and he took a photo of me that my mom would proudly display for the rest of her life. But all the mother’s pride in the world wouldn’t guarantee me a job, and I now faced the harsh reality of the academic job market.

Chapter 2: Identity Crisis

I’m not sure when depression became a part of my life, but judging by the drinking problem I developed in grad school (I quit drinking in 2016—a hell of a year to stop drinking), it was probably at some point during my Ph.D. program. My life after grad school certainly did not help. All throughout grad school, we were told (both implicitly and sometimes explicitly) that the only outcome that really mattered after the Ph.D. was obtaining a tenure-track job at a four-year institution. Anything else was, at best, a temporary setback while we continued to search for the tenure-track job. At worst, it was a failure. Of course, by the time I graduated in 2016, the tenure-track job market was a complete disaster (and it has only gotten worse since then). History doctorates were a dime a dozen compared to the scant number of faculty jobs available.

I got some bites in my first year on the job market. I scored some interviews. No job, though. Same in my second year on the job market. Same in my third year. In the meantime, I wandered around in what I started calling the “adjunct wilderness,” piecing together classes at multiple institutions across the vast Houston area, putting hundreds of miles on my car as I frantically drove from campus to campus, trying desperately to string together a living.

In the meantime, I was suffering from what I now realize was an identity crisis—which, I’m now convinced, only hurt me in my search for a job. See, I went into grad school wanting to be a research historian. I wanted to write books. And that’s what I was trained to do. That’s what my advisor prepped me for, that’s what every faculty member I worked with pushed me to do. But then something happened in the last two years of my program. I was given my first classes to teach on my own, as the instructor of record, and I fell in love with the classroom. I’d long thought that, as an introvert, I would be terrible in front of a room full of students. Quite the opposite turned out to be true. I was kind of a natural (they don’t teach you how to teach in grad school, trust me). Everything I thought I would do as an LGBTQ historian, I was doing in the classroom. This was where I could really make a direct impact, not by writing articles for obscure journals or publishing academic monographs that scarcely anybody outside of a grad seminar would read. This was where the magic happened.

So, while my three years as an adjunct were brutal, they were also rewarding in a way I can’t even adequately describe. But, at the same time, there was that voice in the back of my head (which sounded suspiciously like my advisor’s voice!) that was telling me I needed to shoot “higher” than that. I needed to turn my dissertation into a book, first of all. I needed to score the tenure-track job. I needed to get tenure. I needed to publish more books after that. That was the “right” way to do it. Anything else represented a shortcoming on my part, a personal failure, a waste of a Ph.D.

In 2019, I applied for a job at a two-year institution at which I was adjuncting. This was not the kind of job I was “supposed” to have, at least not long-term. But it was a job that I knew I loved. The interview was virtual, and I was convinced I bombed it. Pre-2016, I probably would have drowned my sorrows with wine, but instead I binge-ate Tex-Mex, sure that I blew it. Oh well, another year adjuncting. Then, I got an email inviting me to a finalist interview. I thought they’d made a mistake—surely this email wasn’t meant for me. Needless to say, I accepted. Up until this point, I’d been rehearsing my interview answers, feeding my interviewers what I thought they wanted to hear. I decided that I was going to do something crazy this time. I was going to just be myself. If I got the job, I was going to get the job being myself. Because not being myself was not working for me. So that’s what I did. At the end of the interview, I texted my friend that I think I just scored a job. A few weeks later, I got the offer, and I finally emerged from the adjunct wilderness.

Something else happened in 2019. I presented at a statewide conference, and a representative from an academic press saw my presentation listed on the agenda and reached out to me. He wanted to talk about my work and how it might fit with what the press wanted to publish. I met with him at that conference, and I walked away with an informal offer for a book contract. Later that year, at almost the same time as I started my new full-time job, I received my contract in the mail. I hadn’t even needed to write a proposal—the press came to me! It seemed like everything was truly falling into place. I was in a job I loved. I was going to publish a book about the topic I cared so deeply about by that point. This was a rather unconventional path compared to what I’d been told was the “acceptable” way to be an academic, but it seemed that I was going to achieve success after all.

My dissertation, now a book manuscript, went out to readers shortly after I signed my contract. It came back with positive comments, but (as expected) a list of revisions and areas that needed to be improved. It wasn’t anything drastic, but it would require me to go back to multiple archives, in addition to conducting multiple oral histories to fill in some gaps. This was what I’d trained to do. This was nothing. I was going to publish a book.

We all know what happened after that. The pandemic struck, and the world fell apart. My first year as a full-time faculty member was thrown into tumult as everything shifted online. Archives closed down, not that I had time to conduct research with the enormous amount of work required to fully shift teaching modalities in the middle of the academic year. I was stuck inside, as we all were. My depression—which I still hadn’t identified as depression, but was part of my life nevertheless— worsened. I struggled with my personal relationships, and I retreated into myself. My relationship with Louis entered the rockiest period we’ve ever experienced. It goes without saying that I did not work on my book manuscript. I was barely able to keep it together long enough to adequately teach my classes. As the chaos of 2020 bled into early 2021, it really felt as though I was at my lowest point (but that was still to come, little did I know).

As a new administration took over in Washington and vaccines made it possible for the world to open up again, I slowly emerged from the darkness. I settled into the new reality created by the pandemic. Louis and I worked on our relationship. I started living again. But teaching became much more complicated than it used to be, with the new landscape shaped by the virtual classroom. I spent much of my time on my classes, which I enjoyed, but the book manuscript languished. That voice in the back of my head kept nagging: “If you don’t get it together and get this thing done, it will have all been a waste! You’re a failure! You’re a disappointment!” I compared myself to colleagues who successfully published. If they could do it, what was my problem? Was I really cut out for the academic world? Maybe what I’d long thought was impostor syndrome wasn’t really an illusion after all.

The press was understanding. The pandemic shut down the archives. Of course I needed more time! I requested an additional year. That turned into another year. And then another year. In the meantime, guess how much work I was doing on the manuscript. I told myself (and the press) that it was because of the pandemic, it was because of my teaching schedule, it was because of this, it was because of that. But there was a deeper truth that I had yet to uncover.

Chapter 3: The Calamity

In 2022, my personal life went through enormous change. Louis started getting into the electronic dance music (EDM) scene and going to raves. He tried to convince me to give it a try, but I vehemently rejected the idea (the thought of an introvert like me going to a rave was ludicrous in my mind). He had a rave group he hung out with, and it became a legitimate passion of his, and that was great for him. He went to EDC Las Vegas that year and met a guy named Adam.

I should pause here to explain that Louis and I have long had an open relationship, much like many other gay male couples we know. Romantically, we’ve been monogamous, but we sometimes enjoy the company of other men. Adam was one such guy, and a friendship formed. Later, he came to Houston to visit us, and to say that we hit it off would be an understatement. We became the Three Musketeers, if the Three Musketeers were…you know. Nothing was forced. It all happened as naturally as can be. At a certain point, we had to admit to ourselves (and, eventually, to others) that this was more than a friendship. We were in a relationship, and a serious one at that.

Louis and I had discussed polyamory before, but we both believed that it wasn’t really for us. That being said, since we were already “open,” it wasn’t exactly unthinkable. It ended up feeling a lot more natural than we thought it would. Adam seemed to round us out in ways that we didn’t even realize we needed. He could be the guy to go to raves and festivals with Louis. He could also be the guy to stay in with me and make me feel safe when my anxiety was at my worst. He could do it all, it seemed. We felt lucky to have found him, because he truly seemed perfect for us. He complemented our already strong relationship and it felt as though he made us even stronger.

Our lives changed in ways we hadn’t imagined before. Adam worked in Big Tech, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves living in what felt like a movie. Money ceased to be a concern at all. We moved in together, renting a beautiful house in an upscale neighborhood. If we got bored on a Tuesday night and wanted to drop $500 on dinner at Uchi, we did. We wanted to go to Hawaii, and we did—and we traveled in luxury. Adam was quite generous, although later we would realize that money was just one way in which he exercised control.

And it’s not like there weren’t red flags. I won’t go into detail about what happened in Hawaii, but when we recount these events to others from beginning to end, the universal opinion is that this relationship should have ended in Hawaii. Instead, we went to counseling together, allowed Adam to gaslight us into thinking we were wrong, and moved on. As terrible a person as Adam turned out to be, we allowed it to happen to a certain extent. We put our heads in the sand, ignoring red flag after red flag, because we wanted it to work. And when things were good, they were really good. But then they turned bad.

I’m not going to rehash everything that happened after we returned from that Hawaii trip. There are too many things to go over, and at this point, they all kind of bleed together anyway. Suffice it to say that there was a point at which we could no longer ignore the red flags. We finally realized the extent to which we’d been manipulated and gaslit. And we broke up. Louis and I remained together, stronger than ever by this point because of the shared experience. Adam became a roommate. We told Adam that we were happy to be roommates until the end of the lease, and we would not get in his way or cause any issues. We were all adults, after all. That said, we were not going to be friends with him. This was not going to be “amicable” in the sense that we would be buddy-buddy after the breakup. We would be roommates, and nothing more.

Adam did not handle this decision well. He remained insistent that we be “friends.” What that likely meant, in his twisted mind, was that we’d be friendly enough to give him sex without the commitment of a relationship.

When he finally realized that it was truly over and that we were not going to be “friends” with him after all that happened, the mask finally came off completely. He turned into the monster he always was, but had become adept at hiding from others. We now realize that he is likely an undiagnosed clinical narcissist. He had the money to leave and go somewhere else, but instead, he stayed. And he did everything he could to make us live in misery. He started using his subwoofer to deny us peace and quiet (and sleep). He brought strangers into the house, but if we dared to bring a friend over, he blew up in increasingly escalatory ways. We started feeling genuinely unsafe in our own home. The climax to this situation came this past Christmas Eve. Adam was set off about something, and he started blasting the subwoofer late at night. We confronted him and (not really knowing what else to do or say) told him we were going to call the police. He told us to go ahead, and that if the police came, they would find what he'd planted on us (heavily implying that he’d planted drugs). More words were exchanged, until Adam ran down the stairs and started chasing Louis around the house. At that point, we called the police. As abusers often do, Adam played the police like a fiddle. They boiled it down to a roommate squabble in which all sides were at fault, and before they left, they said that if they had to come back, “Somebody will probably be in cuffs, and we don’t know who it will be.” After the police left, Adam immediately cut off our Internet access. We quite literally barricaded ourselves inside our bedroom, not knowing what would happen next. That is where we stayed until late Christmas night, when we were sure he was gone.

Adam stayed away for a few weeks, and when he returned, it was clear that he was on the way out. It’s likely that the police visit rattled him enough to finally move on. But in the meantime, we still had weeks of hell to suffer through. If you’ve never felt unsafe in your own home, you can’t know what it’s like.

Throughout the entire ordeal, which began long before Christmas Eve, I was at just about my lowest point. We both were, but I also suffered physical symptoms of stress. My body had a massive autoimmune response, and I ended up sick with an inflamed liver for about a month (something I now fully believe was triggered by stress). Louis and I were each other’s rock during this time. I don’t know how either of us would have gotten through it without the other. When Adam finally left, we were in ruins in many ways, but we had each other, and we were stronger than ever.

Chapter 4: Rebirth

It goes without saying that pretty much everything was put on hold during that period of my life. I existed. I did my job to the best of my ability. I certainly did not work on my book manuscript.

In the aftermath, we rebuilt ourselves, slowly but surely. We blossomed, both as a couple and as individuals. My liver episode caused me to start seeing a dietitian, because whether or not it was stress-induced, I did have a fatty liver that needed to be addressed. I lost over 20 pounds and, brick by brick, rebuilt my relationship with food (an ongoing process). I saw a weight management specialist who finally put two and two together and realized that the root of all of my physical ailments was my untreated depression. He put me on Zoloft, and it turned my life around. Gradually, I’m rediscovering my interests and starting to “live” again, rather than simply existing. Louis, in the meantime, has thrown himself into his photography and baking passions. He recently scored a deal with a local coffee shop to be their macaron supplier, and I couldn’t be prouder of him. We are the strongest we’ve ever been as a couple, and I’ve never been more certain that he is my “person.” Far from driving a wedge between us, as he tried to do, Adam cemented our bond. (Oh, and we stayed in the nice house. Once a source of pain, it is now a sanctuary.)

Perhaps the biggest change since I started treating my depression has been my deepening interest in EDM, which I was only open to trying when the Zoloft brought me out of my shell. It’s quite an odd interest for a mid-30s professor to pick up, but here we are—life is strange. I went to my first rave with Louis, and I realized that it’s the perfect place for an introvert, as strange as that sounds. It’s a collective experience, yes, but it’s a deeply personal one, as well. My first rave experience was more meaningful and constructive than a decade’s worth of therapy—no exaggeration. I couldn’t wait to go to my next rave. I’ve been to three raves and two full music festivals at this point. Every evening, when I go on my walk, I retreat into my music. It is my new therapy. It is how I connect with my inner self.

It is here that I am going to bring this story full-circle. Last month, Louis and I went to the Ubbi Dubbi music festival in Fort Worth. It was hot and miserable…and I loved it. We thought we were only going to the first day, but I convinced him to call off work and go to the second day with me. Zoloft is a hell of a drug.

Up until this point, while I was much happier, something was still nagging me. I still felt as though something was “off” about my life. And as we danced under the lights, with the ground shaking underneath us, I finally realized what it was. Somehow, in that moment, I was able to see all the distortions in my mind for what they were. I was able to strip them away and see the truth. I could see who I really was. And I finally accepted it: I don’t want to write this book. It’s not who I am anymore, if indeed it ever was.

I’m a teacher. That’s where I make my difference. I don’t owe anybody this book. I don’t owe my dissertation advisor. I don’t owe my colleagues. I don’t owe the press. I don’t owe the academy. I already told the story I wanted to tell, and it’s freely available for anybody who wants to find it. Publishing this book was really all about satisfying what I imagined were other people’s expectations of me. But I don’t want to do it, and I’m not going to, and that doesn’t make me a failure (because, make no mistake, I could do it if I wanted to). I’m not a research historian anymore—if I never set foot in another archive, that will be all right with me. And that’s okay! I’m in my dream job, one that doesn’t require me to publish a thing. There are people who would kill to have what I have. Life is too short to chase after something I don’t really want.

The weight of the world has lifted off my shoulders. My book has died. And I think I can finally start living.

x YouTube Video

LGBTQ LITERATURE SCHEDULE (2024)

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