By Paul Varnell

Over the years, I seem to have circled around the idea of “self-education” without ever addressing it directly. So maybe I should try to do that here.

For many of us, education does not end with high school, or college, or even graduate school. At each stage of formal education you learn more and more, but even after each of these formal stages, there is always more. It is a continuous, lifelong process. And the interesting thing is that at each stage you learn the inadequacy of what you learned at some earlier stage.

Most obviously, we all have to keep learning about our field of expertise and/or area of employment. That field, whatever it is, keeps growing and changing, whether it is computer technology or literary analysis or advertising techniques. If you don’t grow, you shrink—in comparison with what you need to know of the newly available information and techniques. For instance, I write about art and music for the Free Press, so I have to keep reading about these fields, among others.

But there is more of the world than anyone’s own field to learn about and understand better. All of us are unavoidably involved in the wider worlds of politics, sexuality, economic behavior, literary and artistic culture and the pressure of history. The standard rationale for learning about these things is that it makes you a better citizen. Maybe, maybe not. But I’m not sure I’m interested in being someone’s idea of a “better citizen.”

It seems to me that a much better reason for learning about these things is that it is personally rewarding. It makes you a richer person. You are able to see things in a broader context and understand more of the web-like connections among things than you did previously. And, of course, the big secret here is that this makes you more interesting to yourself.

This especially applies to gays and lesbians. Our formal education does not present us with a very comprehensive understanding of our sexuality and how it interfaces with either a largely heterosexual world or a subculture of other gays and lesbians. What the world generally provides is oversimplified slogans, stereotypes, conflicting views, feebly supported scientific claims and handy acronyms. So we have to work this up on our own—either through passive absorption or by a more concerted personal effort.

Gays and lesbians who are over, say, ages 40 or 45, have some familiarity with this process. They (we) will probably recall their own effort, often desperate and obsessive, to understand themselves by going to libraries and looking for books on homosexuality (mostly catalogued under HQ 76), or, lacking that, older books on “sexual perversion.”

Nowadays, young gays probably try the Internet, googling topics or looking them up on Wikipedia. But the information there is not always reliable and is in any case usually pretty sketchy. Sexuality is complicated enough that an average website posting is not going to give you a very satisfactory answer. Most of us know this from our experience in looking up things we already know about. Internet resources are an OK place to start, but a sad place to stop.

So ultimately I come back to the old advice: Read a book. What books? Most magazines and newspapers publish reviews. Ask friends what they have read. (I do this.) Ask a librarian (“What’s a good book on…”). Ask an employee at a small bookstore. Visit a college bookstore and see what books are recommended reading. (I stumbled across a couple of fascinating little books on sociology that way.) If you like a book by an author, read more by him. (For me, recently, that would be New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman.) Browse through his or her bibliography to see what books he likes.

I could tell you books I like, but you might be interested in different things than I am. I toyed with the idea of a “Paul Book Club” but found that some woman on television had already beaten me to that idea. Several years ago, I did publish a list of what I considered the 10 best non-fiction books on gays and homosexuality. It is probably somewhere on the Internet, but (having learned more) I would slightly revise that list now.

Don’t forget that there is also some merit in reading a book about something you don’t know anything at all about. We all have to start somewhere. And there is some merit in reading books that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy or climate of opinion, whether in politics, economics, religion, cosmology or Near Eastern archaeology. Not every dissenter is a Galileo or a Darwin or a Spinoza, but I admire any writer who is willing to say he sees things differently and gives his reasons clearly.

Some of Paul Varnell’s previous columns are posted at the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org). His e-mail address is pvarnell@aol.com.