“SCROLLS OF SILVER SNOWY SENTENCES”: Fragments From An Intellectual Autobiography

This chapter looks back to the moment more than thirty years ago when I moved from Britain to the United States to begin graduate study, a moment that coincides with the beginnings of what came to be known as queer theory. No one from my family had been to college, let alone graduate school. My entry into the unfamiliar world of academia, a deliberate exile from family and home, was inseparable from my being gay—being “different,” “difficult,” and “overly sensitive,” as it tended to be coded in my youth. Too “literary” by far for a lad of my social class in the industrial Midlands, I gravitated toward literature as an escape from the stifling conformity that later I would learn to call heteronormativity. In the books I devoured, I sought not a reflection of myself but completely different worlds, more capacious vocabularies. When, in 1984, a woman at my family’s church warned that “everyone who reads English at the University of East Anglia turns out gay,” I knew where I must go. The stigmatized, effeminate “literary” would become my way of life. What I could not have known then was that queer literary studies would be, in some sense, my destiny.