Adam Sonstegard: "Performing the 'Unnatural' Life: America's First Gay Autobiography", Fall 2002

Autobiography of "Claude Hartland", Author of The Story of a Life, Discussed

Sonstegard, Adam. "Performing the "Unnatural" Life: America's First Gay Autobiography."

Biography. Volume 25, Number 4, Fall 2002, pp. 545-568.

The first known autobiography written in America by a self-described homosexual man appeared just over a century ago.

The author, who was thirty years old when he published the autobiography in 1901, adopted the pseudonym Claude Hartland.

A publisher of medical textbooks in Saint Louis, Missouri, printed his book—a slender volume in a green, clothbound edition, which Hartland titled The Story of a Life.

The narrative's one-hundred pages detail Hartland's physical symptoms and personal idiosyncrasies as a kind of case history for the benefit of the local medical fraternity, to whom he dedicates the book.

Records show that Hartland's memoir actually reached few of those physicians, falling into obscurity for decades until San Francisco's Grey Fox Press reissued it in paperback in 1985, with a foreword by C. A. Tripp.

David Bergman, James Gifford, and Jonathan Ned Katz have recently joined Tripp in recovering Hartland's memoir, including it in developing histories of gay and lesbian lives and life writing.

This article takes up a number of points from these historians and theorists of sexuality and autobiography to explore more specifically the memoir's original geographic context and professional nature.

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