Dear Doctor…
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It’s probably the rare autobiographer that does so, especially when his or her life contains elements that cause shame, which is the case to different degrees with these eight men. One of the writers in this group even admits in a letter that he had held back important facts in an earlier correspondence. Still, all eight writers come across, at least most of the time, as wanting to be sincere in their self-revealing accounts. With one exception, these narratives were originally published by doctors interested in male homosexuality (though this is not always the term they used for it). Their motive in publishing these accounts was a belief that they demonstrated important things about homosexual desire and those who experienced it. This might lead one to question, not the veracity, but the authenticity of these texts. Did any of these doctors alter them to substantiate their own views? We can’t say for certain, but it’s worth noting that one of the men actually wrote to the doctor who had published his narrative (in 1894’s Archives of Criminal Anthropology) to thank him for the “pleasure at seeing myself published just as I am.”

It is not surprising that all of these men demonstrate a certain amount of internalized homophobia. Far more interesting are the ways that most of them, writing at a time when science was just beginning to treat the issue, developed their own theories to explain why they felt as they did. Some decided, for example, that since they were attracted to men, they must be women trapped inside of men’s bodies. (In the case of Autobiography Seven, this leads to some very interesting reflections on the nature of women.) Operating largely without access to scientific explanations, the men struggled to construct original identities for themselves because they knew that they were not like other men, but society had yet to develop many working hypotheses.

The most fascinating part of this book is observing the inner workings of these eight men’s minds. What’s more, editors William A. Peniston and Nancy Erber do a good job of situating the original editors of these texts, the doctors who first published them, in the burgeoning and by no means monolithic thought of this era. The leading scientists, such figures as Auguste Ambroise Tardieu and Jean-Martin Charcot, engaged in lively disputes over such critical questions as the extent to which homosexual men were responsible for their sexual feelings, a contrast that Drs. Antheaume and Parrot referred to as “inversion caused by vice” and “inversion of hereditary degenerates.” (Arguments that homosexual desire was involuntary were often linked with theories of degeneration that didn’t fall out of fashion until after World War II.) The doctors’ commentaries on these texts, while not always pleasant reading, offer insights into how the science of the day saw gay men.

Because they appeared in medical journals, the French originals of these autobiographies are not readily accessible today, especially in the U.S. Thus Peniston and Erber have provided a real service by making these works available to an English-speaking audience. Anyone who has ever struggled to create a personal identity out of his or her feelings and the options provided by society will be fascinated to see how these men undertook the same struggle with little information and less hard science to go on.
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Richard M. Berrong, professor of French at Kent State, is the author of In Love with a Handsome Sailor, about the novels of Pierre Loti.