Patrick Merla. Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories. New York: Avon Books, 1996. Hardback. 365 pages. $24.00. ISBN: 0-380-97340-5. (Also out in paperback.)

This is less a review of textbooks and more a view of the possibilities for teaching WRT 305. My view of composition, in fact, raises doubt, deep doubt, about the idea of given forms, models, genres, conventions, technique as teachable enterprise and textbooks as treasure troves of such seeming stabilities. I mean we can teach such things, but I mostly believe that such teaching has, at best, next to no effect, and that at its worst, shuts down writing totally, so that the reason for composition's being (to write, maybe?) gets displaced by all the things we supposedly need to know and do in order to write. So you cannot get a book review from me without getting some of philosophy of composition and my theory of what 305 is up to.

The studio curriculum was purposely constructed, at least in its earliest social formation, to sustain the lively practice of, and investigation into, writing. Stress lively. Not the simple reproduction of given forms for themselves or the teaching of writing as convention, or the manufacturing of a consistent curriculum where most everyone is doing the same thing, and all the courses are doing about the same thing. Rather the question was, how might one sustain change over time in something as bureaucratically accountable and as likely to fixate on the static as a writing curriculum? Is it possible, for a little while at least, to institutionalize innovation? Is it possible to create a space in the most conservative of institutions (composition as a field; composition as a service course, as a basic skill; the university as only training ground for a career) for a constantly changing writing environment? Some of us then tried to understand curriculum as process, rather than as a commodity of designer or signature goods assembled for students and departments seen as consumers.

Two "principles," themselves now much altered over time, worked as a sort of twin gyroscope, keeping a kind of dynamic balance temporarily in effect, helping with navigation into new expanses. The first navigating instrument was disciplinarity; the studio curriculum was to be discipline-based. Based on recent work in composition and rhetoric. As the discipline of composition studies changed, so too the curriculum would shift. Teachers and students were not only to be aware of current developments in the field and discipline of composition and rhetoric, but were to be trying out versions of these ideas, were to be testing out how robust such concepts were in the rough and tumble of a large, varied and fairly demanding undergraduate student population. The second instrument was theory. Syracuse University is still the only undergraduate writing curriculum I know that is fully theory-based. Now there are all sorts of theory, and while the curriculum has always developed somewhere along the borders between phenomenological and critical theoretical traditions, there has been a long local tradition of reflective practice embodied in reflective essays written by students in their studio courses, by teachers in their teaching portfolios, and by professors in their yearly reports and applications for tenure and promotion. Theory also meant that the curriculum (and administration) would be theorized. We were producing writers; but we were also producing theorists.

I have been trying in my WRT 305 classes since 1990 to work through tensions both within the discipline of composition and within theory, but also between them. The field has been superficially concerned in this period with critique of the subject of writing and, more, with the tracking of the discourses of class, race, gender, sexualities across texts and subjectivities. Discourse community theory yielded by the early 1990s to contact zone theory and its offspring and second cousins. Most of these practices have been top-down, reverting to a simple inculcation model in the classroom where students are expected to track gender bias or racism in other people's text, and sometimes their own, or to trace naive or facile cultural difference through pseudo-ethnographies, like I used to track metaphors and other tropes and figures for my new critical professors. One might theorize this as being a reversion to a model approach, only we have changed the model, expanding our field of problems rather than dealing with them head on. This is the consumerist approach to culture. The logical end of this is postcolonial discourse and its critique, I suppose. Still, the goal seems to be to study and produce models of critique, to model one's writing on other (established, official) critique. Theory then calls into question the very products of theory in the discipline. And I am not about to go back to the models of teaching that revert to a sort of politicized new criticism (nor for that matter repackage the modes of discourse into genre theory).

All of this should make clear how I do not use This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class and Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories in WRT 305. I do not use these books – they are not textbooks; I hardly ever use textbooks in any course anymore – to prod students to analyze class and sexualities properly. That is, these are not models of analysis that my students read and then model, mimic, copy, reproduce, or insinuate themselves in or between (the latter, a corruption of the notion of intertextuality in the composition method of Bartholomae and the Pittsburgh school). Nor are they in any transparent way stimuli that open a conversation about class and sexualities. Aside from the fact that I have problems with "conversational" models of teaching and writing, a position that, to be sure, cuts me off from a great deal of contemporary philosophy and rhetoric, I think such approaches to composition, while they tend to begin to include students and student interests and concerns, also tend to reproduce what Deborah Tannen calls the argument culture, the idea that everything is equally arguable and that every argument has two sides plus. "Plus" meaning all the stuff, the stances, the positions, in between. Not in my world. I also think that using reading to stimulate talk and using talk in the classroom only to stimulate writing for the course is a short term model and potentially relativistic policy, that may engage students but carries with that engagement a shelf life. A label should come attached to such policy "Use by end of the course" or, even more realistically, "Best if used by end of this writing assignment." Instead I try to use such texts as documents, among many others, including texts I have written and texts students have written, as well as films, and excursions onto the internet or into television, that address the course theme; in this case, I wanted to ask students to explore the theme of the shifting terrains of public versus private.

More than any single convention I might talk at students about, the huge changes that have occurred in this decade and that are still occurring, still being worked out and negotiated in what counts as public and private when it comes to writing and speech, seem to be what will determine the writing processes and products of students long after they have finished my course, have graduated, and have taken up positions in business, science, government, education. My view is that apprentice writers in my WRT 305 need to be aware of these shifts and their effects on discourse, and need to learn to synthesize public and private in new ways, ways neither they nor I can hardly imagine. So we are looking to the future in my 305. I try to teach to the future, for change, especially in the advanced course, to those long term trends and forces now at work in our culture and likely to have major effects on who my students become, how they will construct their identities, their writing processes, their writing products over the next decade or two. So unlike a model approach that looks back perpetually to the established genres and conventions of the past, we try to look to the future, to transform genres, conventions.

What, in conventional wisdom at least, seems more public (distant, external, nonpersonal, cool) than social class? What, conventionally, seems more "private" (intimate, close, personal, internal) than sex and sexuality? These books invert conventional wisdom – itself, as Thomas Newkirk in his recent book The Performance of Self in Student Writing notes, the oldest value in English and composition, but still a move that I and my students find interesting.

For example, Laurel Johnson Black in her essay "Stupid Rich Bastards" shows how social class is private as well as public, intimate as well as distant. She reflects on her experiences, especially upon coming to college and then eventually deciding to go into academic work and get a Ph.D. (in English and composition – what else?). And she shows how class never goes away. If anything, for college students and academicians, it gets stronger the farther up the ladder one goes. Stephen Garger in "Bronx Syndrome" describes home experiences and places them beside his college and academic experiences with hilarious results. Garger portrays himself as Mr. Inappropriate and attributes such behavior to his Bronx (and class) upbringing. But again in a turn or inversion, Garger argues persuasively how this has actually helped him in his career and that class (and neighborhood) pride (rather than shame) can actually aid critique – and writing. His comments like many of the essays that follow about the differences between academic discourse and home or neighborhood language are worth more than all the volumes of discourse community theory or contact zone theory produced over the last decade.

All of this makes these essays seem more personal than public, when it is precisely that binary, that very category system that is the target. Black notes that "My life is not an essay." These are not autobiographies. Nor are they simply arguments about class (or gender or race) and language. They are both. They accept and critique such categories and move toward synthesizing new ways of experiencing our culture. They are hybrid essays that fail as either pure autobiography or pure academic discourse.

As do the contributions to Boys Like Us. Coming out is itself a hybrid act, synthesizing public and private. This collection of coming out stories, arranged historically beginning in the late 1940s and proceeding, every few years, to the 1990s has the effect of something of an American cultural history. The book has several other unique features including the fact that all essays are written by writers. The photographs of these writers at the time they came out are attached to the end of each essay; a current photo is found in the back with biographies and extensive bibliographies. The dedication is to just a "few" of the gay writers felled by "the plague," a list of three columns and 144 names. The first essay "Coming/ Out" describes the experiences of Sam Delany and the processes of coming out 1949-1957. The twenty nine essays ranging right up to 1995 are about as diverse as you can get stylistically. Sexuality is clearly not any single thing in a collection where one might expect the opposite. And sexuality is absolutely not understandable in this collection without some recourse to history, to a description of the times in which these men were growing up, and to the ways sexuality but also family and personal identity are constructed and, in fact, have changed.

So Sam Delany's essay "Coming/ Out" is a narration of his experiences coming to awareness of his gayness in the pre-Stonewall 1950s, yet one cannot really know what this means without placing the fact that Delany is an African American into the context of the 1950s and New York City. That Delany chose to become a science fiction writer also suggests quite a lot about the times of Sputnik and the A-bomb and the Cold War. But most of all Delany's is a readable critique that advances certain poststructuralist arguments about identity at the very moment he is "revealing" his identity. A creative writer who does theory? Yes. Now there is hybrid!

Michael Nava is known for writing mystery novels featuring gay Hispanic lawyer detective Henry Rios. Michael Nava's piece "Boys Like Us," which lends its title to the book, was especially liked by my students. It's a reflection, nearly twenty five years later, back to Nava's last years of high school (1971). Nava does a superb job not only describing what being gay meant to those around him and to himself at that time, but also evoking a person's first experiences with falling in and out of love, which evidently connected with many students in 305.

Boys Like Us was the biggest surprise for me in the course. I hesitated to use it, but felt some obligation since it fit the theme we were investigating and because gay folk are made almost as invisible on campus as working class folk. Many students commented on the readability of the essays and wanted me to know that they, on their own, had read many more than the four assigned essays and that they liked the book a lot. But these two sections of 305 students were very mature in their ability to deal with issues of sexuality (and difference) and, in fact, commented that they wished more of their education at SU had dealt with sexuality. They found it a scandal that, to their knowledge, only one other course besides my WRT 305 had ventured anywhere near the topic. We do not seem all that far from the puritan mores of the fifties as far as university offerings are concerned.

Let me underscore that I did not ask students to talk about or write about their sexuality, let alone sexual experiences, but rather I asked them to come to a seminar group of about eight students with whom they had been working for several weeks and with whom they had a history, at the end of about thirteen weeks of studying shifting terrains of public versus private discourse, and theorize that dichotomy. The Delany essay was a difficult, though helpful start, because it was a strange combination of high theory with some explicit sexual descriptions, of serious argument with novelesque narration. Hybrids again. And, as I do with all my seminar groups, after we had dealt with issues of understanding and response to individual texts, I left open the possibility that students could add their two cents worth. Which they did.

I see seminar work on texts like Boys Like Us and This Fine Place to be sort of seed talk. It does not immediately go into any specific assignment in the course. I admit that we do that sort of talk elsewhere – and a fair amount of it in my courses. But the seminar and the seminar talk is a long term down payment on the students' development as writers. The future again – the forces that are reshaping what counts as public and private writing, and the processes by which the writer reconstructs her or his self come together in an uneasy dialectic in these seminar groups and in these texts.

I want to thank Professor of English and the Humanities, Victor Taylor, York College, for all our discussions. The category of process as Ann E. Berthoff, Alfred North Whitehead, or Charles Hartshorne use it, seems to be a broader and more dynamic concept than that of model or modelling (or genre, convention, genre theory). By stressing a worldview that sees change as primary, and world as event, process philosophy attends to the unrepeatability of process and writing. Process philosophy tends to look to the future, rather than trying to capture and cage the present or the past. Hartshorne, commenting on Whitehead, notes "…in the creative act which is reality itself, 'the many become one and are increased by one.' …Thus the process of experiencing is a perpetual unification of a pluralistic reality, which, as fast as it gets unified, becomes pluralistic again, and so can never be finally unified…" (60-61) in "The Development of Process Theology" in Evert Cousins (ed.) Process Theology: Basic Writings.