School, typically, is no place to be caught being queer and knowledge about homosexuality for the majority of young lesbian, gay and bisexual people is routinely constructed within communities of practice. In this paper, I draw upon my own and others' literacy practices to show how our identities and readings of texts were framed by being positioned in relation to discursive practices of social groups. In exploring the formative literacy practices of middle adulthood gay men, I have endeavoured to explicate the relationship between literacy and sexual identity and by reconstructing life histories of particular experience(s), I have attempted to map a relatively uncharted terrain of the socio-sexual contexts in which literacy is embedded. Our experiences indicate how literacy became a productive tool with which to construct future selves and our textual encounters were a way of resisting the heteronormative practices and pedagogies of our youth.