Coda

Queer Autobibliography: Acts of Reading and Ways of Belonging charted the relationality of books and lives, narrative forms and worldly experience, sexual desire and textual habitus. Its focus on books and narratives in its material, metaphorical, and metonymic deployments highlights innovative generic formations, oscillation between introspection and extrospection, and the political valence of aestheticization of life. In both writers, one could see the importance of writing/narratives/documenting their lives to the fullest, which brings into question the theme of death. It can be argued that both thought of writing their lives as a way to eclipse death, a welter of autobiographies written under the spectral presence of death. Early in UV, White recounts his encounter with death when he suffered a heart attack. Incapacitated, he longed to return home against medical and family advice. His partner, Michael Carroll, would read to him at his bed in the hospital; however, that was not enough for him. Home meant books, not restricted to reading but a wholesome companionship with them where they inhabit the same space as White. He recounts his return home after being discharged: “What bliss to see all my thousands of books. If I couldn’t read them, at least, like Jorge Luis Borges, I slept best surrounded by them” (White 2018, 13). Thus, books are more than the account of one’s life; the seduction of books and reading that can rival the impulse to write or, even, “to live” (Henderson 2019). They are spaces, within and without, where one establishes a kinship; they are venues of camaraderie, networks, and bonds. They are private property, “my thousands of books”, to be passed on after death. They are history, as sites, repositories, and records of it; catalysts for his associative memory weaving, braiding, interlocking, and forging tangled links that result in inexhaustible connections and, therefore, narratives about them. Thus, the story of life and the story of books are interleaved in White. Death will be the only way to sever this connection. Therefore, brush with death awakens White to the most elemental part of his living—books. One can argue that by compiling his ruminations on books, sex, and literature, White envisages queerness in Munoz’s terms, which is always located in the future, to be actualized in the readings of the queer readers who will be future writers and continue the cycle and pass the baton, much like he did, as was discussed in Chapter 1. By reposing faith in reading, White (2018, 26) performs the ultimate act of queer solidarity, one that envisions a future where the textual and sexual are braided together, reminding us of the struggles of queer history and preserving the moments “that burn with anticipation and promise”.