The first known autobiography written in America by a self-described homo sexual man appeared just over a century ago. The author, who was thirty years old when he published autobiography in 1901, adopted pseu donym Claude Hartland. A publisher of medical textbooks in Saint Louis, Missouri, printed his book—a slender volume in a green, clothbound edi tion, 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 benefit of local medical fraternity, to whom he dedicates 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.1 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.2 This article takes up a number of points from these historians and theorists of sexuality and autobiography to explore more specifically memoir's original geo graphic context and professional nature. Revisiting book's urban setting, reconstructing medical community as a professional entity receiving Hartland's work, and recreating some of middle America's popular attitudes toward sexuality at turn of twentieth century, all serve to clarify local, and even interpersonal, work Hartland accomplishes in this memoir. Even at these intimate levels, however, his memoir sounds remote from contemporary gay British autobiographies, which remain more familiar to modern readers. In Britain, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Edward Prime-Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde had begun to coin such terms as intersexes, simisexualist, uranian, or more famously, the love that dare not speak its name. Hartland only seems to have had access to languages Biography 25.4 (Fall 2002) © Biographical Research Center