When I was 19 years old, I visited New York for ten days on the way to London. I was flying from New Zealand, that small island nation in the South Pacific where all sexual acts between men were still illegal. My body was naive and innocent, but my mind had somehow (partly through conversations with older, less naive students at Auckland University) absorbed essential knowledge about gay life happening elsewhere.
Gay life happened in London, in Paris, in San Francisco. But more than anywhere else, it happened in New York. I was terrified. What would happen to me, in those sinful cities of the plain? With any luck I would be corrupted, and thoroughly de-moralised.
It was November 1982, and Manhattan was freezing, especially after sub-tropical Auckland. On my first day, I walked ten or so blocks south from my hostel in Chelsea to Greenwich Village. My knees trembled, but still they carried me towards my goal. The theme tune from Sesame Street went through my mind: “Come and play, everything’s A-OK, friendly neighbours there, that’s where we meet, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Christopher Street?”
It wasn’t difficult – you just walked south on Seventh Avenue. Where Seventh met Christopher, if you turned right, you passed an improbable number of gay bars and seedy bookstores until you reached the infamous, nefarious Christopher Street pier. I turned left. I walked past the Stonewall Inn, and soon I came to a not-so-seedy bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, where Christopher Street met Gay Street. Intrigued by the name – how could I not be? – I went inside.
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I was the only customer in the shop. Behind the counter, piled with books, were a woman, and a man. They started talking to me. The man, Edmund White, told me that he was a writer, and the books were copies of his new novel, A Boy’s Own Story (1982). A real novelist! I looked at the book, at the beautiful boy in a lilac vest on its cover – a new hardback. It was too expensive for me.
Sensing that my hesitation was financial, the woman told me that another book by the author, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), was much cheaper. By the time I left the shop I had a copy of States of Desire, and two invitations. One to join Ed for tea at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and another to hear him read from a novel-in-progress.
He was billed alongside the painter Joe Brainard, who was reading from his own wonderful book, I Remember (1975). “I remember how much, in high school, I wanted to be handsome and popular. I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer.”
I remember that Edmund’s voice, reading from his book Caracole (1985), was fluent and mellifluous. But I found his prose much more difficult to follow than Brainard’s poetry. After the reading there was a party, with biscuits, rounds of Brie and grapes. Among these confident Americans I was shy, and I thought the Brie was impossibly sophisticated – I had grown up with New Zealand Tasty Cheddar.
Enchanted worlds
I met Ed at the New York Institute for the Humanities on a cold, grey afternoon, and walked with him to his apartment on Lafayette Street. We chatted as we drank tea. “What authors do you like?” he asked me. “What music do you listen to?” He gave me a copy of A Boy’s Own Story, which he signed: “For Hugh, at the beginning of a friendship.”
This was indeed the beginning of a friendship, although I haven’t seen Ed since 1998. I introduced him when he read from yet another novel, The Farewell Symphony (1997), at the University of York. Ed was extrovert and gregarious, whereas I am introverted, often painfully shy – and not good at keeping in touch.
But over the years I have read and reread Ed’s work. His autobiographical novels, his memoirs, his short stories, his travel writing, his criticism, his biography of the French writer Jean Genet, his utilitarian guide to criminal pleasures, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977).
Why does his writing mean so much to me – and to many other queer readers? Ed may have been confident, gregarious, never afraid to speak or to write about his own queer life, and the queer lives of others. But his writing also charted the anxieties, the anguish, the remorse, the self-loathing that were probably a part of every “gay” life in America in the 50s and 60s. And many gay lives in New Zealand in the 80s, for that matter.
In A Boy’s Own Story the narrator remembers the enchantment of a marionette troupe performing Sleeping Beauty at his third birthday party. The performance transported him to a world in which “evil was defeated and love crowned”, in which “things devolved with the logic of art, not life”. Ed himself was such an enchanter: his art may have imitated life, but it also created magical worlds for his readers, enabling them to defeat evil and to find love.
Our lives can imitate art. His art gives us the thrill of articulating what may not be articulated, of speaking the names that dare not be spoken, as when, on the last page of A Boy’s Own Story, the “boy” (now a remembering man) tells us how “scandalised” he was when Mr Beattie, the teacher he is seducing, “asked me to lick the bright red head, to roll my tongue around the head of his penis”. How scandalised and thrilled I was reading those words.
Now Edmund is gone – he passed away on June 3 age 85 – but his enchanted worlds remain. They are there for us to read, and to reread, to inspire us to remember, remember, remember.
Hugh Stevens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
