When Being Yourself Just Isn’t Good Enough

So much can be changed: A name thrown aside, the body altered with a scalpel or a set of weights, an accent elevated, personal history revised with a few plausible stories. There is a brand-new you inside, waiting for its cue.

From the pioneers to Gatsby to Ivana Trump, the idea of reinventing oneself has exerted its magnetic force on the American imagination. The dream has had a particularly strong pull in the world of gay men, where abandoning the past, with its secrets and doubts and restrictions, is often an inevitable step in a life story. An aesthetic of self-creation has long shaped much of gay culture, and, this summer, some gay men followed the story of Andrew Cunanan, murderer and fabricator, with a particular interest.

If Cunanan the serial killer was an aberration, Cunanan the self-inventor was not.

“We have to create identities, usually separate from our family and the environment, the community we grew up in,” says Jeffrey Escoffier, a gay writer and editor who lives in New York. “That opens up a kind of gap that a lot of people fill in different ways.

“You have a new haircut, you change your looks, you go to the gym. The self-fashioning process is one that ranges from small changes to significant ones.”

Cunanan told people he was rich. He said he had been an intelligence officer in the Israeli Navy. He said he had gone to Yale, that he owned a company that used Mexican workers to make Hollywood sound stages. For a long time he costumed himself in those charming, successful selves.

Eventually, the lies and pretense imploded, the charm went sour, and Cunanan disappeared in a spasm of violence. The attention he received worried many gay men. Draw no morals from this story, they said: We are not homicidal, we are not pathological liars, our sexual orientation does not lead inexorably to chaos. But some saw in Cunanan’s penchant for self-invention a distorted, exaggerated version of something familiar.

For decades, the gay neighborhoods of San Francisco, New York and Washington embodied the promise of change, freedom, friendship, acceptance. Greeting cards and T-shirts were emblazoned with the slogan “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” To come out of the closet, to move to those gay utopias, was to be swept up by a tornado and dropped into Oz.

“Once you find your sexual identity is different than you imagined, or everyone else imagines--it’s a very profound matter,” says Frances Fitzgerald, who wrote about the culture of gay San Francisco in her book “Cities on a Hill,” a portrait of visionary communities. “Once you eject yourself from the world of the common understandings and assumptions about who everyone is or what they should be doing, then the choices become enormous.”

That identity is mutable--something to be played with, embellished--is an idea very much at home in the fashion industry, the theater. It is, however, more problematic when the seductive promise of limitless change collides with reality.

Daniel Harris, author of “The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture,” remembers a roommate of his, a “poor boy in Boston” with no money and few prospects. “One day, I came into the cafe where we hung out, and he was pondering if he should actually buy a title. It was so gay!”

One night he got lost on the subway and came up in Sheridan Square, which was filled, that summer evening, with young men staring at each other, talking in boisterous throngs. He vanished, meanwhile, from his former friends and family as if he had gone to Bali, or died in a traffic accident.

Fifteen years ago, Fitzgerald noticed that gay men often spoke of coming out in religious terms. According to Frank Browning, author of “A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward a Sexual Self,” coming-out stories are “remarkably like Southern Baptists talking about getting saved and being reborn. That really does come out of a very strong piece of the American religion, that you will find the God within yourself and that is who you are.”

To re-create yourself is, sometimes, to discover your true self. “When you’re a member of a group that is often scorned and often discriminated against,” says playwright Paul Rudnick, author of “Jeffrey,” “then self-invention may actually be a form of genuine self-acknowledgment.”

Reborn gay men often find that old assumptions about family, love, community, fall away as well. In the ‘70s, men once derided as sissies remade themselves into “Castro clones,” with cowboy boots and button-fly Levi’s, plaid shirts and leather jackets, and studiously well-muscled bodies. In Fitzgerald’s “Cities on a Hill,” Randy Shilts, who chronicled the early years of AIDS in “And the Band Played On,” said: “We have no role models. We have to find new ways to live.”

But long before the closet door opened, the gay aesthetic, embodied by Oscar Wilde, had been one that elevated fabrication, posture, artifice. Life in the closet, Escoffier says, requires “a kind of acting, so you’re used to wearing a mask, and you’re used to having a false identity.”

In Washington in the early ‘60s, a group of men formed the Academy Awards, a drag club that ever since has provided its members, now more than 200, with a weekend escape. They also get a surrogate family. Members are divided into three “houses,” each with a “mother,” “aunts,” “children.” When a new member joins, the relatives guide him through the creation of an alternative self.

“It’s so gratifying,” says one of the founders, a man in his 60s who chooses to go by his drag name, Fanny Brice, because “I have family in the area.”

“Take a young man who’s, let’s say, 30 years old. Maybe he’s baldheaded, and maybe he’s got a little paunch on him, and maybe he’s not real attractive to boys in the bars--nobody ever picks him up or sends him a drink. Well, when you put him in drag, he’s immediately got beautiful hair and he’s got on a pretty dress with a girdle that holds in that potbelly, and he learns to walk in heels.

“You get your own little specialized world that you can excel in, and you become very popular.”

Artifice stares down reality, with all its disappointments, and--at least for a weekend--defeats it.

After AIDS invaded the paradise many gay men thought they had discovered, the playful theatricality took on a grim subtext, but the creations continued. Now, however, energies were also directed toward altering the world outside as well as refining the self.

Gay men built unprecedented institutions like Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, and redefined the relationship between patients and the medical community. The isolationists who turned the Castro in San Francisco and other neighborhoods into self-enclosed “gay ghettos” became activists protesting on the steps of the National Institutes of Health.

Self-invention is hardly restricted to gay men.

Rudnick thinks Cunanan’s lies were more a symptom of his social yearnings than anything to do with being gay. And the foundation of social climbing is improving reality.

“Whether it’s a false title, or just adding a Von or a Van into your name, or a Jr. or a III, or having one of those ambiguously wealthy last names like Ford, Whitney or Paley--they’re all useful social syllables,” he says.

The process of crafting our public personas is constant. “We go through this every time we rework our resume--you want to show yourself to have a more coherent or presentable self,” Escoffier says. “That’s a common American thing--I don’t think that’s so gay--but I think the gay world makes it easier to do.”

“There’s a kind of rootlessness in this country,” Fitzgerald says. “It rather increases this sense of who are we, where are we, these kinds of issues that simply don’t turn up in more stable societies.”

So we perch between optimism and unease, paradoxically believing that the more we change the more we become what we really are.