An interview with Edmund White on the occasion of the publication of City Boy (Bloomsbury, 2009, 298p), in the current issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review, is the best introduction to his new memoir. Here is an excerpt:
Michael Ehrhardt: Getting back to the subject of gay lit, you write about Christopher Isherwood. His novel A Single Man, published in 1964, is arguably one of the first openly gay novels that isn’t camp or tragic, as opposed to Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Would you agree?
EW: Giovanni’s Room is weird, because it’s written by a black man, but there are no black characters in it. I mean, it seems like the idea behind it is that men are desirable as long as they’re straight, but the minute they go to bed with you they become sisters, and therefore they’re bad, like trash, and all you can do is bump pussies with them. I remember when I came out in the 50’s that’s what people thought. And Baldwin just echoes that. Then there’s Vidal’s book, which is camp, with lots of campy dialogue.
ME: So, you’d agree that A Single Man was an early avatar of the positive gay novel?
EW: Yes, a hundred percent. And why was it so ahead of its time? I’d say because Isherwood was part of the original gay revolution in Berlin and actually lived in Magnus Hirschfeld’s house. Isherwood had tremendous class confidence, and he lived during the war years and afterwards in California, which is one of the great breeding grounds for modern homosexuality, and got all the fall-out of the GIs coming back from the war. Many GIs came out around that time. The army was a great breeding ground for modern homosexuality, because you had all these young men, who were far from home, who thought they would die any day, who were all thrown together in the barracks, so why not seize the moment? And a lot of those guys settled in the beach communities of California after the war, because they didn’t want to go back to Pittsburgh and get married to their childhood sweethearts.
ME: Isn’t that what a lot of the phobia is about “Don’t ask, don’t tell”?
EW: I think there is a lot of homosexuality in the Army. But I have a theory which you can agree or disagree with, that before homosexuality became so public, so vocal, and so politicized, there was a lot more casual action than there is now. I think that between AIDS and then the high profile of it, it discourages people from experimenting. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the old Mediterranean world of Greece, for instance, where almost any man, if you paid him something, was readily available.
City Boy has received mostly positive reviews. And rightly so. Despite some name-dropping and unnecessary gossips, White's memoir is full of memorable portraits, particularly those of James Merrill, Peggy Guggenheim and Susan Sontag. Many other famous, and less famous, characters appear through the pages which recount White's life in the 60s and the 70s, mainly in New York, the city where 'nothing lasts'. The memoir provides a lively description of gay life during these two critical decades, and the author portrays his sexual life very candidly. It is also the story of man becoming a writer. The books ends with the advent of AIDS, the publishing of White's (finally...) breakthrough novel A Boy's Own Story, and his departure for Paris in 1983...
2009.11.29
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