ABSTRACT
Following Oscar Wilde’s aphorism from Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)— “the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible”— this chapter explores the impulse among some queer modernist authors to embrace their notoriety as sexual and gender outcasts. Tracing a legacy that begins with Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1905), this chapter follows the path of queer modernist “autobiografiction” through the letters and avant-garde poetry of Wilde’s nephew, Arthur Cravan, to Quentin Crisp’s first memoir, The Naked Civil Servant (1968). These works undermine the possibility of capturing a true account of their authors’ lives however deeply scrutinized they may be, using modernist tactics of pseudonymy, heteronymy, and multi-identitarian claims to refashion the presumed infamy of queer lives into a kind of conspicuous celebrity. This chapter reconsiders an array of queer modernist life writing under these new terms, proposing that queerness’s performative quality allowed writers to reimagine how their lives would be perceived by the broader public. Rather than hiding from the effects of discrimination and criminalization, many authors embraced a desire to be famous that fell outside both the history of pride and queer negative affects including shame and despair.
