Back in 2022, I wrapped up my sixth volume of memoir, GAY GEISHA, calling it quits at the half-way point in my eighty-some years. The first half of my life (1942-1982) was unusual and fascinating enough to recall, but the latter half (1982-2022) is way too boring to bother with.

Besides, all kinds of people have written reams about the plague years and the liberated lives of youths in this new century, and I know very little about either subject anyway. These past two good years of focused artwork are at last leading to completion of my Tonalamatl project and series of trecena blogs, and now I find myself slipping back into memoir mode again.

I recently picked up an old book-awarded memoir by a late gay author and read about his tormented gay life set almost in my timeframe. Suffocated by a suburban, middle-class upbringing and rigid religious environment of elite privilege, the author called his closeted youth an internal exile, imprisonment. This is of course exactly the kind of thing that commercial publishing loves because the righteous straight world thinks we gay folks deserve to agonize.

Dickie with Toy, 1943

Well, the comparison with my own young life couldn’t be sharper. I never lived in a closet—because I grew up “normally” (though saddled at first by an insane religion). When I “came out,” it was a natural evolution, like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly—without guilt or opposition—and my gay environment was truly exciting, picturesque, and historic. Such a story is simply too positive, upbeat, and way too real for commercial publication. Not nearly enough angst.

That’s why I’m slipping back into the memoir frame of mind. We need us a good memoir of growing up normally, of a childhood without precocious agonies of sexual- or gender-identity confusion, without moral or social conflict. I need to write about the mind-boggling innocence of my childhood, dig deeper into the ancient material of MS YVONNE, The Secret Life of My Mother, and mine the primitive Arkansas years of my semi-fictional BAT IN A WHIRLWIND.

Already I’ve written several pages of an illustrated first chapter of KID STUFF called The Id-Kid, planning a clutch of half a dozen or more, and as usual posting each as it’s completed. Please be patient.

Just for reference, my other memoirs are DIVINE DEBAUCH, THERE WAS A SHIP, and LORD WIND. You’ll only find anguish of a sort in THERE WAS A SHIP. They’re all celebrations of gay life and so aren’t commercially attractive. Again, far too little guilt and grief.

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