In the ’70s, All New York Seemed Young and Gay

A book review by Dwight Garner

Books of The Times

CITY BOY: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s By Edmund White

297 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.

The Stonewall riots in 1969 changed almost everything about gay life in New York City, and that famous event is now, in one respect, like Woodstock: far more people claim to have been there than actually were.

In all of the gonzo testimony about Stonewall, however, no reaction to the rioting has struck me as being so painfully honest (or so funny) as the novelist Edmund White’s. He was there at the Stonewall Inn when it erupted, he writes in his new memoir, “City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s.” And when all hell broke loose, his initial response was to sit and stew and cluck.

“I thought we shouldn’t create a fuss,” he admits. “This was bad for our image. I said out loud, ‘Oh, come on, guys.’ ”

That “Oh, come on, guys” moment is put into painful and complicated perspective in “City Boy.” Mr. White had arrived in Manhattan from the Midwest seven years earlier, in 1962, spurning a chance at a Harvard Ph.D. to follow a lover.

“I was a living contradiction,” Mr. White writes. “I was still a self-hating gay man going to a straight psychotherapist with the intention of getting cured and getting married.” He adds, “There was no ‘gay pride’ back then — there was only gay fear and gay isolation and gay distrust and gay self-hatred.”

“City Boy” quickly becomes an open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early ’70s: crime, graffiti, garbage in the streets, Steppenwolf and Foghat leaking out of car tape decks, gay men wearing whistles around their necks to summon help when ambushed by gangs. These bad old days morphed into a star-spangled gay coming of age in the decade after Stonewall. Gay men could chuck those whistles. They were taking judo classes and becoming buff, striding armies of one.

Mr. White was there when the sexual piñata ripped open, and he collected his share of the goodies. In his previous memoir, “My Lives” (2006), he happily over-shared about things like his boundless appetite for male prostitutes, whom he ordered to his door like so many steaming boxes of pizza. In “City Boy” he remains a shock-and-awe exhibitionist.

Orgies; leather bars; tabs of LSD; sex on the balconies of gay dance halls, in the abandoned piers along the Hudson River and in the dunes on Fire Island; group sex with American Indians and Norwegian flight attendants from Minnesota — it’s all here in exacting and eye-popping detail. He captures the “odor of brew, harness, sweat and Crisco” that began to fill gay men’s nostrils in the mid-’70s.

Mr. White was a kind of sexual werewolf. As midnight approached, he says, “my hands began to sprout hair, and my teeth to sharpen.” He sleeps with so many well-known writers and artists that this crackling if lightweight memoir can read less like a prelude to “And the Band Played On,” Randy Shilts’s stately book about the early days of AIDS, than an all-boy update of “I’m With the Band,” Pamela Des Barres‘s trippy and picaresque rock groupie memoir.

He describes a quickie with the travel writer Bruce Chatwin here; a three-way with the poet John Ashbery there. The notches Mr. White claims on his bedpost are vast and crisscrossing, and he likes to run his fingers along them in wistful horndog memory.

There is a great deal of sex and gossip in “City Boy,” but it is also a minor-key account of Mr. White’s coming of age as a writer. He worked for years in book publishing and other stray jobs before his first novel, “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973.

To pay the rent he was a co-author of “The Joy of Gay Sex,” published in 1977, a book that shoved him completely out of the closet. Glancing around at his arty friends, he sometimes wonders if that was a smart decision.

“I thought a bit resentfully that all these ‘blue-chip’ artists — Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson — never came out,” he writes. “We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us — ‘Of course since I’m not gay myself your work seems so exotic to me’ — while the Blue Chips sailed serenely on, universal and eternal.” The closet began to look like a cozy place to be.

“City Boy” looks outward as much as inward; there’s nearly as much about Mr. White’s famous friends as there is about his own life. There are fond recollections of time spent with people like the poet James Merrill (for him Mr. White smuggles contraband sleeping pills from abroad) and the sociologist Richard Sennett, who at dinner parties might change midmeal, Mr. White observes, into a chic little black dress.

He describes his rocky friendship with Susan Sontag, who pulled her blurb from one of his novels after he’d based a character on her in a different book. (“She should have been given the Nobel Prize,” Mr. White deadpans. “That would have made her nicer.”) And he delivers an acid portrait of the writer Harold Brodkey, whom he depicts as cruel and almost insane with paranoia.

Some of this material feels like filler. Mr. White is capable of going on for pages about the Balanchine performances he witnessed. He also drifts awkwardly in “City Boy” from the first person singular into a slippery and indistinct “we” — a “we” that sometimes seems to refer to New Yorkers, at other times artists, at still other times gay men. This is a book with a low-grade personality disorder.

“City Boy” is Mr. White’s second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction (notably the novel “A Boy’s Own Story”) has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time.

“City Boy” may lack some of the fineness and intensity of “My Lives,” which remains the essential Edmund White memoir, the one to read first. But this one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White’s “Oh, come on, guys” meekness has vanished into thin air.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/books/30garner.html