Finding His Voice : For 28 years, author Paul Monette says, ‘I had no self.’ Not until he admitted to himself that he was gay did he succeed in . . .

For Paul Monette, life did not begin at birth.

Nor did it start in childhood, nor at Phillips Andover prep school, nor while he was an honors student at Yale nor as a Carnegie Fellow after that.

Life began, the author says, the day he admitted to himself that he is gay.

By these calculations, he has lived for only 18 of his 46 years.

Monette sits on the brick patio of his hillside house in West Hollywood and tries to explain: The obliteration of his youth is not a dramatic device. It is a fact. For most of his early life, he really was not there, did not record or process his existence as an individual. “I had no self ,” he says. “I was the invisible boy.”

He spent every waking moment hiding from others--and from himself--the fact that he felt different from everyone else. And the best way to hide that difference was to act more “normal” than most.

To his parents he was “perfect Paul,” adored and adorable, so smart and with such winning ways that his mother, Jackie, was incredulous when she read his critically acclaimed 1988 book, “Borrowed Time,” and realized he’d been in misery all those years.

“Don’t you remember anything happy about your childhood, Paul?” his mother asked.

“I had to tell her ‘no,’ ” Monette recalls.

His father, Paul, “a staunch New England Republican” who still lives in the family home, was appalled to learn that his son had suffered so much, right under his eyes, and without his knowing it. “I never had a clue,” he later told his namesake.

He also said that he cannot read “Becoming a Man,” Monette’s new book out this week, because “it would be too painful” for him.

“My father wouldn’t necessarily change anything if he could, because there’s nothing he did wrong. But he wishes he could go back in time and remove my pain, tell me it is all OK,” Monette says.

By now it is all OK.

Before his mother died two years ago, she became a volunteer in the fight against AIDS; his father continues that work. “When they finally understood the whole business (of my homosexuality),” Monette says, “my parents decided they didn’t give a shit what the neighbors thought; to worry about that would be entirely wrong. They were wonderful.”

Monette is in the late stages of AIDS. For this interview, he wears a long-sleeved flannel shirt that guards against the late-afternoon chill and covers the IV port and the six Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his arms. His T-cell count, which should be 1,000, is “down to 20 or less.” And he presumes that the book publicity tour on which he will soon embark “is the last time I will go out in the world publicly.”

But he is grateful he lived to finish the book, which he hopes “will be a road map for gay and lesbian people who follow me.”

He says he wrote it to tell them “that it doesn’t matter how bright or how well-educated you are, or how nice your people are. If you are in the closet and trying to pass and telling that lie to yourself--and eventually you do tell it to yourself--your whole life becomes an act of ventriloquism.”

The new book, the author’s account of his early years, is a tough one for parents “because it is so blunt,” he says. But he’d like to make the point that parents do not cause their children’s homosexuality. “They do cause the closet in which some offspring find themselves imprisoned for years,” he says. And if they want to help, they might consider letting their children come out.

The autobiography hops back and forth in time, like snapshots then and now, cataloguing the childhood moments he can remember, most of which have to do with shame. Shame that he likes dolls and hates athletics, shame that he likes boys instead of girls, shame that he doesn’t have the same reaction to things as other boys his age--and shame that he does not understand why.

The shame began at 3 or 4, continued through college and years beyond--all the while he was earning straight A’s, winning scholarships, writing poetry and honing a sophisticated wit. Perceived as a bon vivant and intellectual superstar by his friends and family, he describes himself as a “cipher and a eunuch” within.

Now, decades later, sitting with a reporter as dusk falls, he says he can still feel the overwhelming misery: “I can see it and smell it, and I spent all my time making sure that other people didn’t. Therefore I was very witty and very charming and alone, alone, alone.”

He cannot believe that anyone could read his book and still feel that homosexuality is “a lifestyle choice.” It was born in him--an inescapable genetic gift, like intelligence, he says.

That’s what he hopes readers will conclude. But at times he worries that the book might give “comfort to the enemy. Fundamentalists could read it and say, ‘Look how miserable that kid was, all because he didn’t have the moral gumption’ ” to go straight.

Although Monette thinks it is easier to be openly gay or lesbian today than in the ‘40s and ‘50s when he was growing up, he says, “the hatred and fear is still there; homophobia makes its way into the news every day, with fundamentalist ministers and congressmen and even the vice president” taking swipes at gay and lesbian people.

Kids are still growing up confused, getting clues that their most basic instincts are wrong or that homosexuality doesn’t really exist. “When I ask dear friends who have children what they will do if one of their kids is gay, most shrug and say they hope it doesn’t happen.”

Many still think that being lesbian or gay is all about sexuality, he says. “But it has nothing to do with odd or exotic forms of sex. It is about a kind of differentness.

“We learn about that from historians and anthropologists, who tell us of tribes where there was a sort of third sex. In Zuni culture, for example, a child could decide at 4 or 8 years old whether he was heterosexual. If not, he became a priest. Some Zuni actually sent each child into a hut, where there was a doll on one side and a weapon on another. The child was allowed to choose, and there was no criticism. What we would call gays and lesbians were the ones who grew up to be the nurturers, healers and shamans of the tribe.”

Monette is living proof that you can’t just wish your gayness away.

He tried for years, and it didn’t work.

At Yale, he was known for his Latin orations, his obsession with poetry, his capacity for friendship and his scintillating wit. And, to his good friends, it seemed he was doing all right with the women, too.

Star Black, a photographer in New York, was a Wellesley student who claimed him as her dear friend. “I never had any idea he was gay, “ she says. “We were extremely close after my boyfriend died in an accident. Paul was the only one who understood I was experiencing widowhood, even though I hadn’t been technically married. I spent wonderful, nourishing weekends with him and he never hit up on me sexually. He was dating other women, and he never said anything” about being gay.

Monette writes in his book that he received top grades at Yale and was recruited by four of the school’s eight prestigious secret societies. Even then, he didn’t feel he was part of the action, or one of the boys.

His goal, never achieved, was to confide in someone--anyone--that he thought he was gay. But since no one suspected, no one asked--and Monette was too ashamed and afraid to initiate the topic.

His self-hatred deepened and was “set in stone.”

He writes: “I still can’t look back without pleading for the pain to stop . . . longing for some bolt of courage or madness to drag me out of the closet before I graduated Yale. Then at least I could say I got something out of those four cloistered years besides a worthless diploma.”

After his friend Black had lived in Asia for six years, she went to visit Monette in Cambridge, where he was teaching and doing postgraduate work.

“I remember coming out of the Harvard Square subway station and seeing Paul in this denim jacket and jeans, looking absolutely fabulous, handsomer than ever,” she recalls. “I stayed with him in his little one-room apartment and we were very affectionate, but it didn’t consummate in a sexual relationship. As a woman, I experienced disappointment, of course, but I still had no inkling he was gay.” They are friends to this day.

Monette’s few, unsatisfying forays into gay sex in those early years took place at pornographic bookstores and out-of-the-way spots where no one in his social set would be likely to see him. His attempts at heterosexuality were equally unsettling, although none of the women apparently ever had a clue that the problem was his and not theirs.

This increased his disdain for himself.

“The self-hatred is the worst thing you have to overcome--even more difficult than the societal thing. Coming out to yourself is more difficult even than coming out to others,” he says. “Those are two entirely different processes.”

Monette’s story has a happy ending, he says. He met Roger Horwitz on Labor Day, 1974, and found love at last.

Together, they moved to Los Angeles, where Horwitz practiced law for 12 years while Monette wrote poetry, TV shows and novelizations of such films as “Scarface,” “Midnight Run” and “Predator.”

For more than a decade, he says, the two of them were “giddy with happiness.” And all the pain he’d endured seemed to float away.

When Horwitz died of AIDS in 1987, Monette wrote the memoir that chronicled the couple’s love and terror as they faced the disease. It was nominated as best biography of 1988 for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was hailed as a “book of terrible beauty” by the Washington Post and as “a magnificent monument” by the New York Times.

Monette’s new book ends on a note of joy, on the day that he and Horwitz met. “Somehow, it’s all had a purpose, once you’re finally real,” he writes.

And he still hasn’t changed his mind.

“Being gay is a central fact of my life; it is how I found love, and why I am an artist, finally. I might well have gone forward and written my gloomy poems and a novel or two of vast irrelevancy . . . but I’ve really come to glory in my difference.”