A review by bucket
City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s by Edmund White
3.0
Ed White describes life in New York City in the 60s and 70s. His status as both gay man and writer are key to his experiences and how he describes them.
The book is more about other people - his friends, lovers, etc - than it is about him. Many famous people feature, including Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, and James Merrill among many other. The book is also more about the signs of the times than it is about him - he describes how the influx of gay men and writers into New York turned it into a place where promiscuity was part of life and where free love and separating friends from lovers from fuck buddies was the order of the day. This turned into the beginnings of the gay rights movement and beginning to see being gay as natural and part of your identity rather than as a disease or psychological issue. He then describes how AIDS changed all this in 1981, and how many of the people he'd known began to die of the disease. He and virtually all of his contemporaries who were living the same lifestyle are HIV positive and a large number of them have already died.
I expected more about Ed White, but in some ways his discussions of the gay/writer culture in New York is probably more interesting. However, this isn't an overly personal story, though White does indicate his particular involvement with each person he mentions (sexual, professional, friendship, etc) in a factual sort of way.
That said, there are some nice passages throughout that give a good sense of White's feelings about this period of his life:
"Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit."
"Because fiction depended on telling details and an exact and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions, it required heightened and calculating powers of observation...for a writer even the dreariest, most featureless evening among dullards became a subject for sastire, a source of "notes" on the new bourgeoisie, a challenge to one's powers to discriminate among almost interchangeable shades of gray."
Themes: New York City, 1960s, 1970s, writer culture, gay culture, AIDS, literature, art, friendship, sex, autobiography
The book is more about other people - his friends, lovers, etc - than it is about him. Many famous people feature, including Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, and James Merrill among many other. The book is also more about the signs of the times than it is about him - he describes how the influx of gay men and writers into New York turned it into a place where promiscuity was part of life and where free love and separating friends from lovers from fuck buddies was the order of the day. This turned into the beginnings of the gay rights movement and beginning to see being gay as natural and part of your identity rather than as a disease or psychological issue. He then describes how AIDS changed all this in 1981, and how many of the people he'd known began to die of the disease. He and virtually all of his contemporaries who were living the same lifestyle are HIV positive and a large number of them have already died.
I expected more about Ed White, but in some ways his discussions of the gay/writer culture in New York is probably more interesting. However, this isn't an overly personal story, though White does indicate his particular involvement with each person he mentions (sexual, professional, friendship, etc) in a factual sort of way.
That said, there are some nice passages throughout that give a good sense of White's feelings about this period of his life:
"Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit."
"Because fiction depended on telling details and an exact and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions, it required heightened and calculating powers of observation...for a writer even the dreariest, most featureless evening among dullards became a subject for sastire, a source of "notes" on the new bourgeoisie, a challenge to one's powers to discriminate among almost interchangeable shades of gray."
Themes: New York City, 1960s, 1970s, writer culture, gay culture, AIDS, literature, art, friendship, sex, autobiography