Several years ago, a friend gave me a present, a book entitled Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945, (ed. Ina Russell. Boston: Farber & Farber, 1993), chronicling the life of the psuedonymous Jeb Alexander, a gay man living in Washington, D.C. during the first half of the Twentieth Century. Beginning when he was only twelve years-old, Jeb wrote in his diary almost every day of his life, until a year before his death in 1965. It is a remarkable achievement and a fascinating look not only at life in general during the period chosen by the editor, his niece, to highlight, but at gay life as well. It is one of my treasured possessions.
There is an entry I found particularly moving, which the editor uses as an epigraph, from Saturday, 14 April 1923:
“It occured to me today with something of a shock how horrible it would be for this diary of mine to be pawed over and read unsympathetically after I am dead, by those incapable of understanding, who would be filled with disgust and astonishment and think of me as a poor demented wretch, a neurotic or a madman who was better off dead. And then the thought of the one thing even more dreadful and terrible than that- for my diary never to be read by the one person who would or could understand.
“For I do want it to be read- there is no use concealing the fact- by somebody who is like me, who would understand.”
I have attempted numerous journals in my life, begining with a diary in the fourth grade that lasted all of three days. I have numerous spiral notebooks filled with the whining and moaning of a self-pitying wastrel and since the advent of the computer, I have dozens of floppy disks chronicling my some sometimes confused and convoluted attempts at recovery and growth. Yet, I often wondered for whom I wrote. Was it only for me to read in my later years as I would look back on my self-destruction or my recovery? Perhaps, I wrote for friends or family, a thought I found comforting until I realized their only interest would be to see what dirty secrets I revealed or what nasty comments I might write about them. At one point, in the midst of my twenty-something alcoholic grandiosity, I considered the possibility that scholars in the future might find my life illuminating. Then, I read Jed Alexander’s diary and his moving entry wondering whether that certain someone who might understand and benefit from his diary would ever find it.
As I near the end of my forties, I have begun to build a life and find some success with my writing. The world of blogging has opened new possibilities for writers and non-writers to have their thoughts and their lives preserved and it is my hope that others who read this blog will find something with which they can agree, something to make them think, something to make them act, something to make them remember someone named Christopher who wanted to make a mark with his writing and leave something of himself behind.
