ABSTRACT
The suspicion that gay writing is on some level always autobiographical is an enduring one. The expression 'gay autobiography' conjoins two categories that in recent years have been contested. Autobiography and sexuality can be apprehended as regulatory mechanisms, part of modern society's array of technologies or ways of knowing, through which a self is produced. Recent critical interest in autobiography and in sexuality has focused more intently on works/lives that are not accommodated by traditional models. Pasolini and his gay critics have a similarly antagonistic relationship. This chapter focuses on two aspects of the intersubjective process that directly inform the text and by implication the identity of the gay autobiographer: the role of reading/the reader, and of other people's stories in self-narrative. The literary or citational nature of the gay autobiographies under consideration here takes a variety of forms, yet it always seems to have to do with questions of the authorization and validation of identity.
