Ian Thomson

Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies

A review of Edmund White's Inside a Pearl. An X-rated memoir of the gay author's 15-year exile in Paris

Edmund White says that the first time he met Bruce Chatwin (pictured), they had sex immediately Photo: Getty
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  • Inside a Pearl

    Edmund White

    Bloomsbury, pp. 261

In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking, sixty-nining, cruising, blowjobs, fisting, rimming and three-ways. Of course, Proust-inspired poetic exaltations to homosexual love have long characterised White’s fiction, from A Boy’s Own Story to Hotel de Dream.

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