Gay diary

A remarkable personal record, but even more crucially, indispensable documentation of the lives of gay men in the pre-Stonewall era.

Bookmark the permalink. The dedication page read, “To THE UNABASHED Those thousands of gay men and lesbians who didn’t wait for the Stonewall Rebellion and Gay Liberation to live full and loving gay lives without undue regard for what family, church, psychiatrists or state thought about it. Pepys’ diary is remembered today for its insight into upper-class life in London.

It seems that Vining saw himself as a sort of gay New York City Pepys. My true kin.”

Vining had been a diarist for more than 50 years and had produced thousands of pages of single-spaced typewritten diary entries. His last published diary entry, written on December 31^st, 1982, begins “As an interim piece of writing I decided to work on the little 500 word essay for SAGE’s contest on MY LIFE AS A LESBIAN OR GAY: THEN AND NOW.

I fussed and fussed with it long after working hours and way out of proportion to the rewards offered.”  He concluded “Since this entry rounds out fifty years of diary, it makes a very natural place to stop. He wrote, “I rebound very quickly to professional setbacks and disappointments, which is either a very great asset or a quality that will lead me and my family smack onto the shoals.

By January 1, 1936, Vining had dropped out of college, where he had been studying drama. For now, at least.” Vining passed away in New York City on January 24^th, 1998, at the age of 80 and is buried alongside Richmond Purinton in Maine.

The Donald Vining papers at the American Heritage Center consist of five boxes of diary transcripts and a published copy of A Gay Diary 1975-1982.

Much of what I came for has not developed or has lost its appeal, but music and theatre are swell.”

By 1945, Vining was working as a clerk at the Sloan House YMCA. I have books, a bank account that permits travel, a job I don’t resist rising to in the morning, small but pleasant rewards from writing and painting, and I have New York.”

Vining long admired Samuel Pepys, who was known for his mid-17^th century diary.

As the year was drawing to a close in 1956, Vining, then 39, wrote, “As I look around me, I seem to have all I ever wanted even if perhaps not so much of any one thing as I used to envision. Much to his delight, he was eventually accepted for graduate studies at Yale’s drama school, where he was “thrown into ecstasy by the beauty of some of the buildings and the aristocratic appearance of it all.” He harbored fantasies of having his own repertory theatre and was eager to learn “a stage hand’s duties as well as an actor’s, director’s and author’s.” Those weren’t the only fantasies on his mind.

He wrote, “had a very disturbing dream last night when I dreamed that I wrote my diary on the rug and on my shirt cuffs – then somebody cleaned the rug and washed my shirts and the printing disappeared. It was there that he was declared unfit for service by a psychiatrist who wrote “homosexualism-overt” on his papers. I'm not quite ready to commit to another year-long reading project yet, but I'll definitely be continuing on to the next volume at some point in the future.