Paul Monette
Writer
Paul Monette, a writer whose autobiography, "Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story," a memoir of suppressing and then celebrating his homosexuality, won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, died at home Friday night. He was 49 and lived in West Hollywood, Calif.
A close friend, said the cause was complications from AIDS.
When he won the National Book Award, Mr. Monette said that writing the autobiography "literally kept me alive" after he contracted AIDS.
Mr. Monette was born in Lawrence, Mass. In "Becoming a Man," he described growing up in a middle-class world in which he became obsessed with his homosexual yearnings but had to suppress them.
Educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Yale University, he taught English at Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., and Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Mr. Monette publicly acknowledged his homosexuality in 1974, when he met Roger Horwitz, a lawyer, and the two moved to Los Angeles. Mr. Horwitz died of AIDS in 1985, an experience Mr. Monette chronicled in the best-selling and critically acclaimed "Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir."