EDMUND WHITE

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

New York Times
Sept 29 2009