Introduction

This memoir is not typical of most for a host of reasons. My challenge in writing it is a derivative of what I hope to accomplish through this book.

In simplest terms, numerous acquaintances have encouraged me to tell my story. They are correct when they tell me that my life has emerged in strange and unusual ways, so I agree that my story deserves to be told. If that was all there was to it, sharing my story as a memoir would require a simple chronological retelling.

But it’s not that simple. Two years after acknowledging that I was a gay man, I met Mickey, a Black man who would become my husband. Seeing the world through his eyes forced me to see my world of white privilege as a fragile contrivance of revisionist history that exists under a constant threat of collapse. 

This secondary story that begs to be told is about exposing narratives that coexist with the chronological retelling because, with every new reveal, the course of my life changes. Exposing these false narratives and outright lies requires me to jump back in time, sometimes a year or two, sometime decades, and sometimes even centuries.

A third challenge that I faced stems from how I also returned to university at the age of 49, and then promptly got accepted into a doctoral program where my research was an attempt on my part to unravel the narratives that had compelled me, over a lifetime, to behave in ways that ran counter to my own best interest. Sharing the product of these years of research emerges as a doctoral dissertation, providing an additional narrative layer.

By the time I had compiled all the above content onto pages, it was clear that my attempt to provide a single narrative of my life was emerging like buckshot, scattered all over the target. A chronological account by itself was not going to work because of how many layers had emerged.

After rearranging the narratives thematically, I came to realize that my life has emerged in three halves.