This article examines the challenges posed to the western lesbian and gay life writing paradigm of the coming out story by postmodern and global cultures. It reads two memoirs published in the 1990s that `queer' the coming out plot, one of an American lesbian-turned-heterosexual, the other of a Chinese woman describing her relationships with women and men during the Cultural Revolution. Jan Clausen's Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity (1999a) and Anchee Min's Red Azalea (1996) each reject `coming out' and its `essentialist' model of sexual identity, showing too its western specificity. However, they equally avoid a fully deconstructive version of queer - Clausen by elegizing her past lesbian self, Min by poeticizing sexuality as the wellspring of individuation and antitotalitarian resistance. While queer's unravelling of homogenous models of sexual narrative has been liberating, it cannot yet rival the power of traditional modernist sexual stories, whether in creating community in the fragmented West, or individual rights in totalitarian societies such as China of the late 1960s-early 1970s.
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