Be Still, My Dear Gay Heart

Currently, currently titled "Be Still, My Dear Gay Heart," is a mainly chronological memoir in which a fairly distinguished Shakespearean scholar recounts the pleasures and sorrows of his homosexual identity and its impact on his professional career. The memoir is organized by the places that have been important in my life. I begin with my early experiences in St. Louis, by and large futile fumblings with no consequences except for my seducing of a priest in my high school who raised the money for a scholarship to the local university and whom I then unfeelingly discarded. I move to my life in the army in Japan, where I have my first serious relationship with another soldier. I broke his heart by going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where I met the love of my life. I move to Russia where he and I are arrested and barely escape eight years in prison. I end at Stanford University and my rather reckless affairs with some of my students.