Becoming a Man
by Paul Monette
Summary
Becoming a Man is Paul Monette's memoir of the half life he lived before he came out, and it is one of the angriest and most liberating coming of age stories in American literature. Monette grew up in 1950s Andover, Massachusetts, a bright, eager, achieving boy, scholarship student at the town's famous academy, then Yale, and the book's subject is the price of all that polish: decades in what he calls the closet's internal exile, performing a self he did not have, starving for a word or a book or a single visible life that would tell him what he was had a name and a future. He is unsparing about the machinery of concealment, the crushes deflected, the friendships falsified, the therapy aimed at cure, and the class snobberies and literary ambitions he hid inside, and unsparing equally about the culture that required it all, the fifties and sixties America that made a smart boy believe he was the only one. The book ends where the life begins, in 1974, when at nearly thirty he met the lawyer Roger Horwitz, the love whose death from AIDS he had already chronicled in Borrowed Time; the two memoirs together form one testament. Becoming a Man won the 1992 National Book Award for Nonfiction over finalists including David McCullough's Truman and Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, a landmark for openly gay literature at the height of the epidemic. Monette died of AIDS in 1995, and the book remains what he built it to be, a hand reached back into the closet for whoever is still there.
Historical Context & Significance
Monette wrote the memoir while living with AIDS, in the plague years when the epidemic was devouring the generation of men who had built gay liberation, and its National Book Award in 1992 was received as a mainstream literary establishment's acknowledgment of both the literature and the emergency. Borrowed Time, his 1988 account of Roger Horwitz's dying, had already become a classic of AIDS witness. Monette used his last years as an activist and essayist, and the Monette Horwitz Trust he established still honors work against homophobia. The book stands with the founding documents of the modern coming out story, still pressed into hands for the reason he wrote it, and Monette died of AIDS related complications in February 1995, little more than two years after the award.