To Know Him Is...a true story, by Dennis Hobart Giles

[Ulysses]

To Know Him Is: a true story
By Dennis Hobart Giles
Published by the author, 2020
Five stars

I think it’s critically important for gay folks of my generation—the children of Stonewall—to write their memoirs if they can. Hobart Giles’s “To Know Him Is…” is a powerful, often visceral, recounting of a life completely altered by the fact that he is gay.

It’s important for us to write those memoirs because straight people need to read them (which is the more difficult challenge). Hetero folks can never, no matter how supportive and loving, understand what my generation (or even more recent generations) went through in the process of understanding and accepting who they were. Even the easiest path is not easy, and Giles’s path was far from the easiest.

For me, the experience of reading Giles’s memoir is doubly powerful, because we were born the same year, and thus “should” have experienced something similar. Sure, we both acknowledged our gayness to ourselves at the same age; and had our first kisses at more or less the same time; but everything else was really different—and that’s why all of these stories are so interesting and so important. After all, “nature” and “nurture” are two very powerful aspects of any person’s life, and he and I are (obviously) very different people. Plus, the fact that he wrote this memoir is heroic in a way that my effort was not. I’ve been a reader and a writer all my life, since I was young. Giles’s fear of reading and writing (not dyslexic, like my son, but something deeper and more painful) make his journey to memoirist even more moving. For both of us, however, writing a memoir was something we needed to do; we both needed to tell our stories.

Giles writes from the heart, not the head. He is passionate and at times undisciplined, but his narrative is gripping, sometimes shocking; often heartbreaking. Like “all of us” he just wanted to find love and a place to call home. We both got what we wanted, but reached it by very different paths. The most important detail is that we both made it a long way towards our goals NOT with the support of our families, but with the support of the gay community we found after our initial coming out. Our families came later on. This is a great truth that many people don’t understand: even today, gay kids go it alone some part of their journey in a way straight kids don’t.

Hobart Giles and I wouldn’t have been friends as kids. We would have had nothing in common but our secret. Today, however, we’re brothers-in-arms, survivors of a process that should be way easier than it is for the kids who followed in our footsteps. His story is important You should read it, too.