ABSTRACT
Why focus this essay on the autobiographies of members of sexual minorities? What I wanted to write about was the modern autobiographer's tendency to portray the self in the light of his or her sexual history. How has the genre been affected by the admission into its spectrum of that most private of human activities, sex? For the most part, however, autobiographers have not seen in their sexual behaviour the key to their identity, the search for which is a central obsession with writers of this century. Although reticence about disclosing intimate details of both their own lives and those of their sexual partners has undoubtedly played its part, most autobiographers, because they belong to the heterosexual majority, tend to treat their sexual lives as something they hold in common with most of their readers rather than as clues to the uniqueness they seek to identify within themselves. Even the few heterosexual autobiographers who have given special prominence to their sexual identity, such as Frank Harris, feel compelled to dramatise and exaggerate their sexual encounters so as to demonstrate the uniqueness of their own experiences. Harris's sexual gymnastics reveal more about his neurotic need (a leftover from childhood) to excel in his father's eyes in whatever he turns his mind to than about the inner workings of his psyche. In fact his sexual feats occupy a relatively small portion of My Life and Loves, and this is true of most heterosexuals’ autobiographies which, like H.G.Wells's for example, attempt to include their sexual history as a prominent element.
