City Boy | Edmund White | Review by The Spectator

Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is imbued with his preferred subject, homosexuality. Now he is most famous for what could be termed his boy-ographies, a regular series of volumes about his passions, practices, predilections and peccadildos, beginning, in 1975, with The Joy of Gay Sex. Next came States of Desire: Travels in Gay America — which might more appropriately have been titled ‘Straights I Desire’. The Burning Library was another book on his favourite theme.

Rather like a male version of Sybille Bedford’s labyrinthine autobiographical technique, one of White’s early, and critically acclaimed, novels, A Boy’s Own Story, was a roman à clef of his growing-up-queer life; later this fiction became fact in My Life: A Memoir. But now, complete with dust-jacket photograph of the presently elderly and balding author as a slim, doe-eyed version of Tony Perkins, White gives us the fucks-and-all City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s.

The brainy, beautiful, but, he says, sexually confused mid-Westerner had majored at the University of Michigan, somewhat exotically in Chinese. In 1962 he flew to ‘mandarin New York’ — whatever that may mean — dreaming of joining the court of that forbidding city’s literary Great Empress, Su-san S’on-tag, though more prosaically, in pursuit of Stan, a wannabe actor with whom he was in love.

I must say he makes the city’s next two decades sound like hell: dirty, dangerous, bankrupt, and worse, homophobic. Which is odd, as I was there at exactly the same time, and to me, in the early 1960s, the place seemed a very heaven, full of delightful intellectual patrician hosts, exciting bars, thrilling new painters, musicians and poets, glamorous Broadway and movie stars, dancers, architects, and the clever, beautiful young. And most of them queer. White seems to have been a bit of a slouch on the uptake. ‘I knew just three gay couples’, he writes a page or so after ‘we had to admit the Sixties hadn’t really begun until the Beatles came over to the States in 1964.’ An astonishing claim. I mean, I knew and loved The Boys, but their troglodyte sexuality was leagues below the raven gyrations of Presley, the white Corvette coolth of Troy Donohue, the slick cowslick of Ed ‘Kookie’ Byrnes, the early Supremes, the Ronettes, Lesley Gore, or the sublime camp of Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips. The sense of liberation that the Kennedy presidency brought seems to have been lost on the serious writer White wished to become.