Inherited Slides: Photo(auto)biography

Abstract

After my uncle died of AIDS in 1994, I tried to write about his life. Jack was my father's twin brother, a man I knew both very well and not at all. I made copious journal entries while he was sick and dying, especially during the last year when I went back and forth from Utah to California, visiting him. After he died, I sorted and organized his possessions and my memories, cut and pasted my writing, wrote and rewrote his life. Even with my house full of his Spode china, Persian rugs, and Waterford glass, Jack evaded me. He was no more present in my writing than he was in the AIDS quilt panel I made for him. I cut up fabric from his own shirts, held together with buttons from those shirts. My writing was as flat as that panel. Defeated, I cut my text into journal entries, fragments of my life and his, going back and forth in time, entered it into a local writing contest under Adult Personal Essay, and won 2nd prize with a $15 gift certificate from the sponsoring bookstore. I found myself agreeing with Shari Benstock that, Every exercise in memory ... demonstrates the futility and failure of life writing(1053). My problem, I realized as I wrestled with Jack's biography, was that so much of his life was hidden from me: as a sales rep. for an electronics company in the '60s and '70s, he had never felt safe enough to come out of the closet. Only in retirement, when he moved from Chicago -If you can make it in Chicago, he'd say, You can make it anywhere-to Palm Springs, did he finally make open gay alliances, particularly with the local AIDS support group, and drop the pretense of heterosexuality. For years, he maintained a neutral appearance of heterosexuality for the family, keeping his gay life quite separate, a life that was so other, I caught only glimpses of it. As his heterosexual niece, his closeted life excluded me, as did his deliberate decision to leave no written records. Trained in literary criticism, I feel most comfortable unraveling meaning when it's packaged in a textual form. Jack's life was marked by its absence of writing. He kept no personal letters, threw out most of his well organized files in the last few months of his life, wrote no memoir. Even his final written text, his will, was inaccessible to me. He set up a trust fund, administered by recently acquired friends in Palm Springs, which sidestepped