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I was still in training when I came across Paul Monette's book Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. I was working as a Health Advisor and HIV Counsellor in GU Medicine in the middle of the AIDS crisis. It was a dark time, the government was scaring the bejesus out of the nation with apocalyptic adverts on TV, problematic assumptions about HIV and gay men were carelessly thrown about by the tabloids, and people were dying. Freud and Sartre were a large part of my training's reading list, but I was also wading my way through Molnos (1990) and Sontag (1991) to try and find material that would help me do something useful in my own specific context.
In some ways, I may have learnt more from writers like Paul Monette than from the standard texts. Or maybe it's not about quantity, it's about quality. Through his writing I got to see the humanity behind illness, about the way that levels of assumed difference can be multiplied, demonised, and limit our ability to engage. While useful, many core, traditional readings are also problematic, unthinkingly assuming heterosexuality (at best) and pathologising LGBT+ experience at worst. We were (and sometimes still are) presented with casual heterosexism or outright homophobia. What a choice! I remember one guest lecturer explaining that same-sex sexuality by its very nature was “sub-optimal”. She was oblivious to the absurdity of this statement and confused by the concern my classmates and I felt. I, on the other hand, felt scared that I was being drawn into an unethical profession, one where we abused power to diagnose mere existence, that we were expected to coerce people into ways of being that were not authentic, that we were nothing more than a mindless part of the oppressive psy-complex that Foucault wrote so eloquently about. The gay community was already suffering physically, I couldn't stand back and be complicit in an invisibilising of sexuality, an attack on LGBT+ existence.
Invisibility. The closet. That's something that t