ABSTRACT
I would like to engage the active reader, for them to produce their own pleasures of this text, Barthes (1976). However, I am mindful of the personal and professional risks involved in such an endeavour, of laying myself open to ‘the trivializing charge of self-indulgence that is so readily levelled by mainstream academics’, Sparkes (2003: 73). I am attempting to create impressions of places and people that led me to question the ways that I belong, act, speak and represent myself as a Gay/Queer man and as a teacher. I am finding it impossible to reproduce a neutral account veiled in an objective representation. An attempt to do so would be mechanistic, technical and methodologically invalidate a critical reflexivity weaved within the process of identifying and reconstructing the contexts which formed my reality of the events, McNamee (1993: 5).
