Composing a Further Life by Bateson Mary Catherine

Author:Bateson, Mary Catherine [Bateson, Mary Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

Pleasure and Responsibility

WHEN I AM INTERVIEWING PEOPLE about their lives, I don’t follow a set sequence or questionnaire. Most people seem to have an established pattern for thinking about their own histories, and these personal patterns tell me more than a chronology of dates and places, so instead of imposing a framework (which might be helpful in making comparisons), I let people frame their own narratives around the implicit plots or through lines that represent their theory of what the story is really about, what in fact their life has been about, a central passion or a recurrent challenge that acts as a landmark as they move from stage to stage. For some it is achievement, for others it may be victimization, while for others still it is continuing discovery and learning. Some connect the eras of their lives to demonstrate continuity, while others remember a series of interruptions and discontinuities.

Back when I first conceived of this book, I felt it would be important to include something about the ways in which gay men and women look at their lives in their later years and at the place of caring for each other and contributing to society in their choices. A colleague put me in touch with a gay couple, over sixty, one of whom at one time had been married and had living children and grandchildren, who were willing to talk to me about their lives and to appear in print without disguise, like others I have worked with on this book. So I flew to San Francisco to stay as a guest in the home of Dan Jepson and Michael Crowe.

Dan lives in Newark, California, a suburb of San Francisco, with his partner of more than a decade, Michael. They have a small house with a charming garden, carefully tended, in which they have installed a murmuring fountain that flows into a fishpond. Most of Dan’s life has revolved around music. On the day I arrived, he and Michael took me to a choir concert in which one of their friends was singing. The following morning, Dan and I sat down to record in the shade of the garden.

Dan knew I had written sympathetically about the gay community in several contexts, including a book about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, coauthored with my biologist colleague Richard Goldsby, and he understood why I had been introduced to him in particular, so it is not surprising that, as he told the story of his life, he emphasized his development as a gay man. It struck me that this was what I have come to call a learning narrative, this one dealing with an unfolding understanding of his sexual orientation, what it meant to be gay, and how to live as a gay man in American society, a lonely process with no real guidance, which led to a lifelong concern with mentoring and heightened my awareness of how much learning is taken for granted when fitting in comes easily. At the same

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