HISTORIAN JONATHAN NED KATZ first published his essay “The Invention of Heterosexuality” in 1990, which he later expanded into an award-winning 1995 book of the same title. The beauty of Katz’s approach was its inversion, so to speak, of popular constructionist arguments about homosexuality. Recall Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that the homosexual as a “species” was “born” in 1870.

TO COMBAT HOMOPHOBIA, it is crucial that we first understand it. We often talk about homophobia as if it were a monolith, requiring just one set of solutions. In truth, this phenomenon comes in several varieties that are linked by a web of overlapping motivations, theories, religious doctrines, political calculations, and psychological issues. Its roots are as complex and diverse as homophobia is itself multifarious. The reality of this social disease necessitates that we carefully diagnose it so we can calibrate our responses and tailor our educational campaigns.

Writing a memoir is fundamentally a ritualizing experience, a literary rite-of passage that tends to occur when a writer is facing—and challenging thereby—the implacability of mortality. Gore Vidal wrote that Tennessee Williams “could not possess his own life until he had written about it.” Of his own life, Vidal snarled when asked if he would be remembered, “I don’t give a god-damn.” In a more contemplative mood, he once mused, “As for life? Well, that is a hard matter. But it was always a hard matter for those of us born with a sense of the transiency of these borrowed atoms that make up our corporeal being.”