City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White Page B

exponentially, they were also more fearless and affectionate on the street than ever before. They were loud and flirty or grim and sex-crazed, giddy or pompous—the whole gamut. I knew that it was only on the island of Manhattan that this visibility and variety existed. When I went to my mother’s summer place in Michigan, I walked aimlessly along Lake Michigan through whole vast armies of sunbathers and not once did I see anything that resembled a gay man. Not one eye strayed toward me or gave me that shutter-click of recognition I was so eager to detect in them.
    In New York I attended a meeting of the Gay Academic Union; perhaps no more than fifty women and men were in the audience, young professors for the most part, though some were independent scholars, and they were talking about gay history and gay cultureand the intersection of feminism and the lesbian struggle—or they were asking, was Thoreau gay? Whitman? Melville? Just to see all those earnest faces tilted up toward the speaker, not cracking jokes, not looking around for ironic grins of confirmation, made me realize how quickly everything was evolving.
    But the sexual abundance and opportunity struck me the most. Even though I was only thirty, I felt too old, too late to enjoy the new dispensations. Yet when I entered a backroom or the back of a truck parked under the piers beside the Hudson, or went into the abandoned piers themselves, I didn’t worry about my age or psychic readiness. At first we didn’t get into the holds of trucks but rather the gay boys crouched under one truck and the “straight” teens from Jersey stood in the narrow space between two trucks and got sucked off. The brackish smell of the cold water flowing nearby and the dance of New Jersey lights on the small, faceted waves in the wake of a passing barge filled me with a cool romantic ardor. This was the chase, the adventure. We heard of bodies discovered floating down the river, of horrible mutilations, of drive-by murders, but nothing could make us abandon the prowl.
    In one of the old piers there’d be no lights at all beyond the occasional flare of a match seeking a cigarette, a sudden phosphorus flash revealing that what you thought was an embracing couple was actually a thick stump of wood with a rusting chain wrapped around it, or what you saw as a gull’s wing was really someone’s shirttail. Ramps led up to rooms with missing doors and floorboards, to a seething Laocoön entwined by snakes or by arms as he held fast to his sons or lovers…
    I had a joyful, drunken reunion with Richard Howard and in my sentimental excitement about seeing him sent him a wrong signal. He said, “Oh, darling, I was hoping you’d feel that way someday,” and I was too polite to clarify the point. Richard spirited me away for a bucolic weekend at the country house of Coburn Britton, a richpoet from Cleveland who was publishing a little magazine called Prose . Coby had an old apple farm in northern New Jersey. We all went over to visit Glenway Wescott, the novelist in his seventies who had been a beauty back in Paris in the 1920s and who’d written one classic, The Pilgrim Hawk . Now he no longer wrote anything beyond his journals but devoted most of his time to being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I thought that was a terrible fate—and now that I’m in my late sixties I, too, am serving on the awards committee of the academy.
    After my all-too-apparent physiological lack of interest in him, Richard politely withdrew and never said a word about it. He was tactful and worldly in the best sense.
    For a few weeks I lived with Marilyn. I’d grown my hair long and I’d come back from Rome with a blue velvet jacket and a white suit. I was skinny and not healthy looking. I’d drunk so much white wine and eaten so many olives and so much bad bread that I looked jaundiced. Italian words kept flitting through my head; I was translating everything I thought into Italian,