Published in: March-April 2018 issue.
Desire: A Memoir
by Jonathan Dollimore
Bloomsbury. 175 pages, $26.
JONATHAN DOLLIMORE is a well-established cultural and literary critic. His 1991 book, Sexual Dissidence, was a foundational text in queer theory, engaging with both Freud and Foucault, among other thinkers.
His new book, Desire, is a meditation in the form of a memoir. Rather than a chronological account of Dollimore’s life, the narrative is fragmentary, held together by a constant need to unravel the meanings of desire and surmount episodes of deep depression. He tells stories of passing encounters, but there are no meaningful characters in Desire other than the author himself. One of the charms of his memoir is to discover how critical he is of the academic world where he has been so successful.
The opening paragraph sets the tone: he comes across a family friend trying to have sex with his (Dollimore’s) mother in the family car. “One of the several complications swirling from this scenario was that at the time, Tony was also having sex with me.” This sentence introduces what is the most provocative part of this book, namely the author’s skepticism that our sexual desires are biological and immutable. The long tradition from Freud through Kinsey and early gay liberation argued we are all capable of a far greater range of sexual urges than we recognize, but this notion has given way to the anodyne “born this way” ideology, which assumes one’s sexual orientation is just waiting to declare itself.
Although Dollimore is usually thought of as gay, his sexuality is more complex, and he is most interesting when he questions the assumptions of the “authentic self” that’s central to most coming-out stories. He is bisexual, although most of Desire charts a world of quick man-to-man sex. He writes: “It’s one of the delusions of identity politics to think that our desire comfortably coexists with our identity, a belief which has more to do with consumerism than desire. I’ve come to feel that sexuality might at different times express different aspects of one’s self, a situation further complicated by the fact that the self changes.”
His meditation on desire is interwoven with autobiographical detail, including accounts of his recurring depression. At times he seems to run to cruising as one might turn to anti-depressants. (But hey, haven’t we all done that?) There’s a familiarity to his descriptions of cruising that echoes earlier writers, such as John Rechy, Renaud Camus, Edmund White. Several times he invokes the English journalist Oscar Moore, who published the novel A Matter of Life and Sex before dying of AIDS at the age of 36. A cynic might claim that there are too many fleeting young men, usually beautiful, parading through the book. My Australian pride was slightly bruised by the reduction of Sydney to one short strip of discos and hot men.
Dollimore came to academia late, and to queer theory with some skepticism. He experiences academic life as stultifying, teaching as less rewarding than is usually claimed: “Museums, libraries and art galleries have always bored me. … It wouldn’t be long before I was heading for the basement toilets of these places, which sometimes afforded a more animating aesthetic encounter.” Given his productivity in cultural and literary studies, it’s hard not to feel that perhaps he protests too much. There are parts of the book that seem slightly pretentious, as if written to deliberately shock the queer intelligentsia, whose writings often seem to overlook the realities of bodily experience. It’s a short book, but there are moments of repetition that could well have been blue-penciled.
Still, at his best Dollimore is a fine and intelligent writer who combines personal reminiscences with philosophical musings in ways that stretch the reader. Like all gay men of his generation, he is conscious of death, and in linking death and desire he pays homage to Freud. I am less convinced than Dollimore, however, that “the primordial first desire is the death of desire itself.” But perhaps Dollimore, too, doubts this claim. The book ends with an homage to a now dead friend and a sense that in grief there is a renewed desire for life, a fitting conclusion to a book that’s both emotionally and intellectually rewarding.
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Dennis Altman’s latest book (with Jonathan Symons) is titled Queer Wars (Polity).
Although Dollimore is usually thought of as gay, his sexuality is more complex, and he is most interesting when he questions the assumptions of the “authentic self” that’s central to most coming-out stories. He is bisexual, although most of Desire charts a world of quick man-to-man sex. He writes: “It’s one of the delusions of identity politics to think that our desire comfortably coexists with our identity, a belief which has more to do with consumerism than desire. I’ve come to feel that sexuality might at different times express different aspects of one’s self, a situation further complicated by the fact that the self changes.”
His meditation on desire is interwoven with autobiographical detail, including accounts of his recurring depression. At times he seems to run to cruising as one might turn to anti-depressants. (But hey, haven’t we all done that?) There’s a familiarity to his descriptions of cruising that echoes earlier writers, such as John Rechy, Renaud Camus, Edmund White. Several times he invokes the English journalist Oscar Moore, who published the novel A Matter of Life and Sex before dying of AIDS at the age of 36. A cynic might claim that there are too many fleeting young men, usually beautiful, parading through the book. My Australian pride was slightly bruised by the reduction of Sydney to one short strip of discos and hot men.
Dollimore came to academia late, and to queer theory with some skepticism. He experiences academic life as stultifying, teaching as less rewarding than is usually claimed: “Museums, libraries and art galleries have always bored me. … It wouldn’t be long before I was heading for the basement toilets of these places, which sometimes afforded a more animating aesthetic encounter.” Given his productivity in cultural and literary studies, it’s hard not to feel that perhaps he protests too much. There are parts of the book that seem slightly pretentious, as if written to deliberately shock the queer intelligentsia, whose writings often seem to overlook the realities of bodily experience. It’s a short book, but there are moments of repetition that could well have been blue-penciled.
Still, at his best Dollimore is a fine and intelligent writer who combines personal reminiscences with philosophical musings in ways that stretch the reader. Like all gay men of his generation, he is conscious of death, and in linking death and desire he pays homage to Freud. I am less convinced than Dollimore, however, that “the primordial first desire is the death of desire itself.” But perhaps Dollimore, too, doubts this claim. The book ends with an homage to a now dead friend and a sense that in grief there is a renewed desire for life, a fitting conclusion to a book that’s both emotionally and intellectually rewarding.
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