In John Weir’s 2006 novel, What I Did Wrong, the narrator, Tom, a CUNY creative writing lecturer now in his forties, recounts his performance in a school play called Impromptu. Before he even delivers his first line—“Who are you? What do you want of me?”—a fellow pupil in the audience starts to jeer: “Shut up, faggot.”1 A chorus of invective follows, a cacophony of “queer bait” and “gay boy.” It is clearly a traumatic memory—he returns to it several times—but it is also a dramatized moment of selfawareness in which the narrator realizes that his queer subjectivity will invariably oscillate between stage fright and the safety of theatrical distance. Though the line is addressed to another character on stage, it comes across both as a fourth-wall-breaking provocation to the audience—an invitation for the other boys to do their worst—and a self-questioning, transposed into the second person; or, as Tom glosses it, “a real moment [. . .] taking place in somebody’s actual life in the guise of a performance about people searching for real moments in their actual lives” (96). It is an episode he will still be analyzing years later:

中文翻译：

---

“过去不是外国”：约翰威尔的艾滋病小说

在约翰·威尔 20​​06 年的小说《我做错了什么》中，叙述者汤姆（现年 40 岁的纽约市立大学创意写作讲师）讲述了他在学校戏剧《即兴》中的表演。还没等他说出第一句话——“你是谁？你想要我什么？”——观众中的一个同学开始嘲笑：“闭嘴，基佬。”1 随之而来的是谩骂的合唱，“奇怪的诱饵”和“同性恋男孩”的杂音。这显然是一个创伤性记忆——他多次回到它——但它也是一个戏剧化的自我意识时刻，在这个时刻，叙述者意识到他的奇怪的主观性总是会在怯场和戏剧距离的安全之间摇摆不定。虽然台词是写给舞台上的另一个角色的，它既是对观众的第四次破墙挑衅——邀请其他男孩做最坏的事——又是一种自我质疑，转换为第二人称；或者，正如汤姆所说，“一个真实的时刻 [。. .] 以人们在现实生活中寻找真实时刻的表演为幌子，发生在某人的实际生活中”（96）。这是他多年后仍将分析的一集：