Edmund White - City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 70s

[An] energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes Harpers Bazaar

Edmund Whites candid memoir of New Yorks gay scene in the sixties and seventies is packed with frequently salacious anecdotes about the rich, the famous and the gifted. In the end, though, it is the city itself that steals the show: crime-ridden, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, all but impossible to live in, but vibrantly alive London Review of Books

City Boy is gossipy elegant and endlessly quotable, an intriguing obituary to a time and place that no longer exists Word Magazine

Edmund White has a wonderful chuckle, full of active mischief and helpless glee a gifted, promiscuous, scholarly, sociable young gay writer Beguiling Observer

New York is evoked with a cinematic immediacy, especially its grungy, dangerous, bankrupt character in the mid-1970s City Boy is, in an important sense, a book about friendship, its proximity to and differences from romance, and its significance in the lives of gay men His ability to reflect on his past with candour and wit remains exemplary Times Literary Supplement

City Boy, plain-spoken and knowing, is a survivors tale, a missive from one of those antlered boys of that era to the others who are gone: this is who we were, this is how it was, this was our city New York Times Books Review

White has an unerring eye for the symptoms of the authorial egotism and, because he freely admits to his own, serves it up as a pure comedy Every page has a great joke or description Evening Standard

A rip-roaring, riotous hoot from start to finish a stud-studded and gloriously gossipy catalogue of all his uber-cool arty pals and his own thrilling exploits in the heady underworld of pre-AIDS gaydom Dazed & Confused

As much as the book is delicious gossip, its also a narrative of understanding and friendship, a celebration of destiny they all shared by being alive in a poor and decaying and free and lusty New York for two amazing decades Irish Times

Edmund White, a master of the erotic confession, is our most accomplished triathlete of prosea novelist, biographer, and memoirist. Truly, no other American writer of my generation manages to be all three with such personal passion and veracity.

The fiercely defiant A Boys Own Story remains the coming-of-age novel that has the deepest resonance for menotwithstanding that its about a gay boy coming of age, and Im straight. (No one who honestly remembers being a sensitive young man can fail to identify with the universal longing, or the frustration and the anger, underlying this semiautobiographical novel.) And Whites recent biography of the mercurial and much misunderstood Rimbaud is fittingly devastating and succinctfittingly, because the outcast poets life was tragic and brief. Now comes a bold, penetrating companion to Whites My Livesan earlier, bittersweet memoir.

In City Boy, the memoirist examines his life in New York in the 1960s and 70s; not only were these vital years for Whites own gay liberation, but City Boy is also the story of Whites literary emergencehis struggles and ambitions as a writer. There is the bracing sexual candor and explicitness White is justly famous for; as he says, What we desire is crucial to who we are. But what is most unforgettable are the piercing self-portraits of the young writer who describes himself as desperate for recognition, and the overwhelming panoply of older, often legendary writers White meets along the way. (I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.)

This splendid book is at once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip. Young gay readers who dont know what it was like to be gay in New York in the 60s and 70s should devour it; those straight readers who are somehow still unfriendly to homosexuality must open their eyes and read every word of City Boy, too. As for those of us, gay and straight, who have long admired Edmund White, this memoir is a wise and humane treatise on the delicate differences between love and friendshipindeed, between lovers and friends. Most deservedly, White has had his share of both, and he writes about them with an irreproachable kindness and affection.

John Irving

My Life in New York
During the 1960s and 1970s

Edmund White

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars.

The upside was that the city was inexpensive, and Manhattan, especially the part of it below Fourteenth Street, was full of young actors-singers-dancers-waiters who made enough money working their restaurant shifts three nights a week to pay for their acting lessons and their cheap rents. Unlike our hometowns back in the Midwest, where the sidewalk was rolled up at six P.M., the delis and coffee shops were open all night and the bars till four in the morning. That whole army of actor-waiters saw their restaurant jobs as just another opportunity for scene study (Who am I tonight? An Austrian aristocrat whos fallen on bad times? A runaway from an incestuous family in the Tennessee Hills? A Swedish gymnast?). No matter how big their tips were, they managed to drink them away in a bar after the restaurants closed as they talked excitedly about their art and their loves. Everyone smoked all the time, and when you French-kissed someone, it was like rubbing one ashtray against another.

New York seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation. To us, however, it represented the only free port on the entire continent. Only in New York could we walk hand in hand with a member of the same sex. Only in New York could we ignore a rat galloping across our path and head out for a midnight play reading. Artists on the Lower East Side were recycling the most primitive and worthless materialsjunk, really.

But there was also a mandarin New York, a place where painters and choreographers and novelists and poets strove to produce serious art of the highest order. This was an elite group of people, scattered throughout the Village and the emerging neighborhood of Chelsea and the comfortable, kicked-out Upper West Side; in this mandarinate artists and intellectuals still felt connected to the supreme artists of the past, still thought that their work would be the latest installment in a quasi-divine legacy.

I had constant daydreams of meeting Susan Sontag and Paul Goodman. I dont know why I focused on themmaybe because they were so often mentioned in the Village Voice and the Partisan Review but even by Time. Hed written Growing Up Absurd, the bible of the sixties, now largely forgotten (I never read it in any event). How could I have worshipped a man whose work I didnt know? I guess because Id heard that he was bisexual, that he was a brilliant therapist, and that he was somehow for the young and the liberated. I read his astonishing journal, Five Years, published in 1966, a groundbreaking book in which he openly discussed paying men for sex and enjoying anonymous sex in the meatpacking district. Today that would seem unremarkable, perhaps, but for a husband and a father back then to be so confiding, so shameless, was unprecedented, especially since the sex passages were mixed in with remarks on culture and poetry and a hundred other subjects.