With my father
I was born at Doctors Hospital on East End Avenue in New York City on October 31, 1956. My father was Theodore Bawer, M.D. (1920-2000), a New York-born internist, writer, and medical editor whose Roman Catholic, Polish-speaking parents, Joseph Bawer (born Bauer) and Josephine (Jozefa) Zawadzka, had immigrated to America during World War One from, respectively, the Galician villages of Brody and Krystynopol in what was then the Austrian Empire. My father was the founding editor, and for over 20 years the editor-in-chief, of a magazine called Hospital Medicine, as well as consulting editor of Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality. My mother, Nell Carol Thomas, was born in 1927 in Florence, South Carolina, to a Baptist father, Harry Everett Thomas, and a Methodist mother, Ruth Elizabeth Hines. My mother's ancestors were English, Welsh, Scots, Scots Irish, and French; through her I'm descended from men who fought in the American Revolution and on both sides of the American Civil War.
Grade school picture
I spent my first couple of years in an apartment on East 89th Street in Manhattan between York and East End Avenues, then moved to a narrow brick house on 82nd Place in Middle Village, Queens, that can now be seen in the opening credits of the TV show The King of Queens. I attended Public School 49 in Middle Village, Junior High School 119 in Glendale, and Newtown High School in Elmhurst. I was an undergraduate and then a graduate student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, where I earned a B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. in English and taught courses in literature and composition.
Passport picture, 1980
Between 1983 and 1993, I contributed literary criticism every month to The New Criterion, which at that time was a journal of literature and the arts. At various times during this period I also served as literary editor for Arrival, a short-lived Northern California magazine; as a writing tutor for honors students at Adelphi University on Long Island; as movie reviewer for The American Spectator, a political monthly in Washington, D.C.; and as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle (whose in-house publication, the NBCC Journal, I edited).
Passport picture, 1986
My essays have appeared in
The New Republic,
The Nation,
The New York Times Magazine,
The American Scholar,
Newsweek,
The
Wilson Quarterly, Standpoint,
City
Journal, and
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
among other places. My poems have been published in such periodicals as
Paris Review
and
Poetry;
and Ive reviewed books for
The New York Times Book Review,
The Washington Post Book World,
The Wall Street Journal,
London Review of Books,
and the
(London) Times Literary Supplement.
Driver's license, 1988
Ive also written several books. The Middle Generation, a revised version of my dissertation, appeared in 1987 and was chosen by the American Library Association as an Academic Book of the Year. In the same year I published The Contemporary Stylist, an English grammar. My collections include Diminishing Fictions, a book of essays on American fiction; The Aspect of Eternity, which focuses on the modern novel; Prophets and Professors, a study of poetry; and The Screenplay's the Thing, a gathering of my film reviews. Coast to Coast, a volume of poetry, came out in 1993 and was named by the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook as the years best first book of poems.
Also published in 1993 was A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. The book was widely discussed and written about, and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; in 1999 columnist Dale Carpenter wrote that it had been the decades most important non-fiction book about homosexuality. One of its many consequences was a five-year stint (1994-99) as columnist for the gay newsmagazine The Advocate. It also spawned two additional books on gay topics: Beyond Queer, an anthology of essays that I edited, and House and Home, in which I helped Congressman Steve Gunderson (R.-Wis.) and his partner, Rob Morris, tell the story of their life together. In 1997 I published Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. All four of these books became #1 bestsellers in gay bookstores and three of them were nominated for the Lambda Book Award.
Passport picture, 1997
In 1998 I relocated with my partner from New York to Amsterdam in the Netherlands; in 1999 we moved on to Oslo, Norway, where we registered officially as partners on May 7 of that year and where we still live today. During these years in Europe I've translated several books from Norwegian to English and have also written While Europe Slept and Surrender. Same-sex marriage became legal in Norway on January 1, 2009, and shortly thereafter my partner and I "upgraded" to full marriage.
We live in a time when many people feel obliged to affix ideological labels to the names of writers. Over the years, I've seen just about every possible label from across the political spectrum attached to my name. In fact I've always considered myself a centrist or classical liberal and I've always been a registered Democrat, though for a time in the 1980s I usually didnt protest when others labeled me a "neo-conservative." At the time, my understanding of this term was that it identified me as a social liberal or libertarian, a cultural humanist, a believer in aesthetic and literary values, and a strong adherent of democracy, fervently opposed to Communism as well as to any other brand of tyranny at either end of the political spectrum. When after the fall of Communism the neoconservative movement, robbed of its major antagonist, began to align itself more explicitly with tyrants of the right and to make homosexuals its new #1 enemy, I felt obliged to sever some of my professional connections, a process that coincided roughly with the gestation, writing, and publication of A Place at the Table (in which, among much else, I record my enthusiastic vote for Bill Clinton in 1992).
In mid-2002 I took the political quiz at www.self-gov.org/ and came up with this result, which places me on the three-way boundary dividing centrist, libertarian, and left-liberal.
In any case I've never sought to serve any ideological establishment in my writings, only to express my own sense of things - which includes reserving the right to criticize undemocratic tendencies on both the right and the left. From time to time this apparent want of ideological purity has caused confusion or even indignation among readers who expect one to fit into a neat right-or-left dichotomy. So be it. As far as I am concerned, the left-right dichotomy has become meaningless anyway. Read A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus and While Europe Slept and Surrender one after the other and you will see that all four books are motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny.