€l“e°" Bv ERNIE MCLEOD dmund White (b. 1940) is arguably our most important living gay writer. Though his often ornate style can be an acquired taste. and his unapologetically sexual sensibility has been criticized by the likes of Larry Kramer. it's hard to come up with another writer whose combined body of work has had a greater impact on how gay literature is viewed.’ White‘s autobiographi- cal novel trilogy —A Bo_i=.'s' Own Story. The Bcuulifizl Room Is Empty, and The Farewell S_vmphon_v — provides a rich chronicle of gay life from the 19505 through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. He‘s also written a pre-AIDS sex manual ( The Joy o/"(Jay Sex with Dr. Charles Silverstein). a nonfic- tion travelogue of gay life in late-19705 America (Slates of" Desire). a book of essays. two respected literary biographies (on Genet and Proust). two idiosyncratic books on Paris. numerous stories. and other stylistically varied works too significant for the mainstream press to ignore. His most recent novel, The ll/Iurriecl Mun — set in the early l990s.‘was a bru- tally honest yet rarely depress- ing tribute to his French lover. Hubert Sorin. who died of AIDS. _ White also happens to be a wonderfully charming and unflappable interview subject; classis: \ One of the delights of research- ing this article was stumbling across the audio of an inter- view (wiredforbooks.org/ edmundwhite) he did after the publication of his breakthrough ’ novel. A Bo_i‘.'s' Own Story, in I982. Its hard not to feel sorry for the interviewer. whose wits are clearly no match for Whites. A Bo_v.'s' ()wn Story (a twentieth anniversary Modern Library edition has just been published) was one of those novels I read years ago when I was struggling with coming out. desperate for any represen- tation ofthe aloneness l'd felt as a closeted adolescent. My most vivid memory of it was the book jacket which. ifl recall correctly. featured a sen- sitive boy~next-door type in a tank-top. No doubt l feared the cover would uncover me to the librarian. who‘d easily recog- nize that boys own story as my story. too. Of the novel‘s text itselfl remembered little beyond the fact it involved a teenager — based on White himself— coming to terms with his sexuality in the 1950s, two unenlightened decades before my own teen years. Because the novel is considered a proto- type for the now familiar (not to say cliched) coming-out story. l recollected it as such, with the standard rites of gay passage rendered in White's lush prose. What I'd forgotten is what a peculiar novel it actu- ally is. The story's centered around the fifteenth year of a precociously self-aware name- less narrator in the Midwest who knows he desires men as clearly as he knows he doesn’t want to become a homosexual. Hoping all the while he might outgrow his homo tendencies, he blunders through a series of erotic encounters (some real- ized, some not), copes with self-loathing and the rather wacky adults who dominate his existence at home and in boarding school, is painfully rejected by the girl he mistak- enly believes will be his het- eromantic savior, and, eventu- ally, seeks a cure at the hands of a famous and quite unhinged analyst. A Boy is Own Story concludes with the narrator emerging on the other side of illusion and disillusion to dis- cover not so much self-accept-_ ance as the self-satisfaction that comes from understanding the adult power of sex. It’s a bold, true, thoroughly unro- mantic ending, one that involves seduction and betrayal and which casts’ the‘ narrator (and, by proximity, the author) in a less-than-heroic light. Comparing the erotic adventures of A Boys Own Story to those of my own ado- lescence, I felt sheltered indeed. For instance, I_’ d hardly have had the wherewithal — as the novel’s narrator does — to I buy myself a male hustler with my summer job earnings. (Interestingly, the hustler encounter is referred to but never described.) Nor did I go to bed with any school leader (along with his wife!) or come across any naked boy waiting in a tree to hypnotize me into action with more than a bright smile. White, on the other hand, recently. wrote in Out magazine that the novel con- tains far fewer sexcapades than he’d had in real life by age six- teen, and he notes the paradox of trying to be true to his own unique experience while mak- ing the character representative enough to resonate with a wide cross-section of readers. He reigned in the narrator’s artistic and erotic precociousness so that he could become, as White ‘ puts it, “a Representative Freak.” I wonder, though, how representative this character could be nearly a half-century later? I’d be interested to know if a teenager today could relate to him. I _ I found myself feeling somewhat outside the world of A Boy’s Own Story, though I’m uncertain whether this was due to the novel being less univer- sal than White had hoped or to an aloofness marking my own passage through time. I do think the elaborate (okay, over- . wrought) nature of White’s imagery sometimes works against the frenetic immediacy of adolescence, even if said adolescence is being viewed‘ through a retrospective lens. -Fortunately, White’s Proustian flourishes have become more controlled over the years and better complement his later work, including some of the . beautifully wrenching yet unsentimental stories in his Skinned Alive collection. Not that A Boy ’s Own Story doesn’t have some stun- ning, timeless passages: “Or was I’ simply at "fifteen learning to love myself at four as now so many years later I like the fifteen-year-old (even desire him), self- approval never accompanying but always trailing experience, ' ‘retrospection three parts senti- mental and one part erotic?” I can’t imagine a more eloquent commentary on how interven- ing years can, thank heavens, kindly influence our assess- '; ment of our younger selves. ; White speculates that l while many facets of gay'expe- l rience have yet to be explored in literature, the “ardent, 1 involved, often contentious” audience that greeted A Boys r Own Story is disappearing. I fear he’s right, but hope he. i isn’t. Considering how many ' I artists of White’s generation l were lost to AIDS (including most of the Violet Quill, the group of emerging gay writers to which he belonged in the l mid-1970’s), I — for one — am eagerly awaiting what our sub versively eloquent Represen- tative Freak has to say about old age. V Ernie McLeod is Vermontk own boy, now living in ‘- Montreal. Contact him at ’ mcleod@middlebury. edu ‘‘I see now that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them . back but not to be a homosexual. For I was possessed with a yearning for the company of men, for their look, touch and smell, and nothing transfixed me more than the sight of a man shaving and dressing, sumptuous rites.”