Life Beyond 77510: One Queer's Journey To Understand Self And Set The Record Straight

This thesis examines the intersections of identity, sexuality, and race relations within the creative nonfiction memoir genre, rooted in the author's personal experiences. Through a first-person narrative voice, it reflects on the author's coming of age as a gay white male in rural, conservative South Texas while navigating the demands of family and the systemic racism faced by Black people, with which he identifies through similarities in his own treatment, as well as with internalized gay shame and loneliness. The memoir's foundation draws on Foucault's theories of surveillance and power to frame the manuscript's exploration of personal memory as both a form of resistance and a reclamation of self. It is structured as a series of short stories, vignettes, and poems that reflect on the key fragmented memories of his past, told nonlinearly about the process of unlearning by discovering who he wanted to be. Music threads throughout the work, sewing together the narrative as a symbol of freedom and self-definition, all on the author's own terms. Influenced by a broad spectrum of writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and Hanif Abdurraqib, who offer their vulnerability alongside their craft and their ability to speak truth in various ways, this project confronts silence and prejudice with direct honesty, vulnerability, and literary craftsmanship.