by Edmund White
While writing U.S. history, I, of course, still wanted to write fiction. I was talking to John Ashbery, who had been to see a shrink who specialized in writer’s block. The conversation he reported:
Shrink: So tell me what your daily schedule is.
Ashbery: Well, I wake up and get up and—
Shrink: You do what?
Ashbery: I get up—
Shrink: You must never, never get up. Okay, pee and make a cup of coffee, but then get back in bed if only for half an hour every day and write longhand in a notebook.
Ashbery: Why?
Shrink: That way your inhibitions will still be low and you’ll be closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out of writer’s block.
I followed the shrink’s advice. I didn’t have writer’s block, though all my failures with plays and fiction had left me feeling wounded. I would feel sick with fear every time I’d begin to write something made-up. I couldn’t afford to have writer’s block in any literal sense; I had to keep writing to survive (and support all these new people, now that I was a “family man”). I could, however, have kept on doing nothing but churning out articles and reviews and ghostwriting, as so many other people in New York did. A novel was a long-term project that no one would finance, at least not in my case. It took years out of one’s life, with no promise that it would ever be published. If it was published, there was no assurance it would earn any money or even be reviewed.
But my sense of personal identity required that I write fiction. If I thought that my only take on life would be the clever remarks or vague thoughts I might be able to cook up on the spot, then I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself.
I knew I had to keep on writing or else I’d let the ambient cultural noise drown out my thoughts, which weren’t paraphrasable wisecracks or wisdom but rather a way of looking at the world or the self. French people dismiss the cultural chatter and self-centered attitudinizing of Paris as parisianisme. A similar noise is generated by hip New Yorkers, though we don’t have a word for it and perhaps we haven’t isolated it yet as a reprehensible phenomenon. This “newyorkism” is so opinionated, so debilitating, so contagious with its knowingness, its instant formulas that replace any slow discoveries, that only people who are serious and ponderous can resist its blandishments, its quick substitutes for authenticity. No wonder the psychiatrist had said one should write first thing in the morning—before the tide of newyorkism swept over one, washing away actual honest thought and replacing it with trendy pronouncements.
But I don’t want to suggest that for me the value of real writing was as a shield against newyorkism, that it substituted private feelings for public catchphrases. What it really did was to set up an idealized construct of life as a rival to actual, formless life in all its messiness. Because fiction depended on telling details and an exact and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions, it required heightened and calculating powers of observation. Living-as-a-writer was different from living tout court to the degree that for a writer even the dreariest, most featureless evening among dullards became a subject for satire, a source of “notes” on the new bourgeoisie, a challenge to one’s powers to discriminate among almost interchangeable shades of gray. Living-as-a-writer was not so different from living-as-an-analysand in that both novelist and psychoanalytic patient must remember their experiences, their aperçus, their ignoble hours and their petty minutes as well as their generous seconds in order to—well, to write it all down, or to report it to the shrink. Of course shrinks don’t encourage patients to prepare, and the dream report is just another form of resistance, one of the most boring as well. And I can’t say that I was ever a note-taker. My sister thinks I have a lousy or at least highly selective memory. Marilyn used to tease me for being so unobservant, saying that she could dye her hair blue and I wouldn’t notice. So perhaps finally living-as-a-writer is more a project than a set of strategies. Perhaps it’s only a good excuse for not buckling down at the chemical company.
Chapter 10
I was approached in 1975 by an English book packager called Mitchell Beazley, who asked me to “audition” for The Joy of Gay Sex. Someone had suggested me but I didn’t find out who till later. They were planning to follow up their international success, Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, with two new books, The Joy of Gay Sex and The Joy of Lesbian Sex. The look of each book, the format, the cover, everything would resemble the concept of Comfort’s book, which had been a huge bestseller in many languages. These new books would be widely and openly distributed, and this way of packaging them was already an act of defiance, I thought. With each of these two new ventures, however, the book packager would team a writer with a shrink. Mr. Mitchell and his American editor, Frank Taylor, got in touch with me.
Frank Taylor had been married and had four sons. He had been the editor in chief of McGraw-Hill, had accompanied Nixon to China, and had produced the Arthur Miller–scripted movie The Misfits—and only recently had he come out. He was in his sixties when he went into his first gay bar, Uncle Paul’s on Christopher Street. There he’d seen a young man he thought was attractive, but the whole idea of approaching the fellow terrified him. At last, on his way out, he handed his card to the guy, who said, “But I’ve been in love with you since I was nine.”
When he was a child, this young man’s parents had written mysteries under a pseudonym. They were Frank’s authors, and once during a visit with them at their home he’d met their little boy, who was visibly upset, frightened because he was about to be operated on for a bad heart. “You put me on your knee,” the young man told Frank in Uncle Paul’s, “and very calmly explained everything to me about my heart in scientific detail. And that’s when I fell in love with you.” The Frank I met in New York in the 1970s was already the happily-in-love Frank I’d later catch sight of in Key West in the 1980s accompanied by this same young man.
Now Frank asked me to write sample entries for The Joy of Gay Sex: on something hard (sadomasochism), something soft (kissing), something technical (cruising), and something psychological (coming out).
For me that kind of writing assignment felt like Method acting. I first had to establish who I was. In this case I thought someone kind but with an edge, someone worldly but patient, someone breezy most of the time but capable of being solemn. A slightly less clever but still amusing version of Cocteau, I thought. Someone who can whip off an epigram but is never a bitch, who thinks in paradoxes but doesn’t insist you admire his wit. Just as pianists talked about something mysterious to nonmusicians called attack, I had to scrunch around on my stool while stoking (today we’d say “programming”) my head with just the right elements of worldliness and compassion and reassuring didacticism. Then the writing went quite easily—as well it might, since I couldn’t take it too seriously at the risk of seeming preposterous in my own eyes. It was that rarest and most agreeable thing of all for a writer: an assignment.
But I did take the project seriously because I wanted to escape the living death of the chemical company. As a writer I enjoyed competing with other contenders, especially since I didn’t know the names of any of my rivals for The Joy of Gay Sex. Part of me—most of me!—was frightened, however, of doing something so tacky, and to this day I wince when I’m introduced as a reader at an Ivy League university, say, and the presenter makes a meal out of this particular title. (“Tonight we have with us the only”—chuckle, chuckle—“actual sex symbol I’ve ever met,” har-har. “He is the coauthor of The Joy of”—heh-heh—“Gay Sex”.) Back then, with just Forgetting Elena to my credit, along with a growing list of Time-Life Books I’d written or partially written, such as an anthropological look at Homo erectus called The First Men (har-har), or one about the Hindenburg (When Zeppelins Flew!), not to mention my forty-page LP-accompanying bios of Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Handel, and other composers, I was afraid my fragile literary “career” would be derailed by a sex manual. When I saw t
he Random House editor Anne Freedgood at the ballet and told her about my new project, she laughed insultingly and patted me on the sleeve and said, “Good. That’s perfect for you.”
I was the writer selected for the project and I was able to quit my job. I didn’t have the nerve to tell my dragon-lady boss about the exact nature of my new assignment. I just said I had a big book contract and put in my notice. Bertha Harris, the literary half of The Joy of Lesbian Sex team, and I used to joke that if we were ever interviewed on television and asked why we wrote sex manuals, we’d say, “For the sake of our children,” since she had a teenage daughter to support and I had my nephew.
At first my boss was panicked because she thought she’d be overwhelmed by work, but she quickly became sly and suspicious and had me barred from my office before the two weeks’ notice period was up. She had not liked me ever since the CEO of the company had praised a brief, clear paraphrase I’d done of a sociological book he was supposed to read, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. She’d become one of the only female officers of the company by being cunning, not through intelligence. So many of the women who succeeded before the feminist era were truly loathsome. They knew they were tokens and were never given any real power, and they maintained their positions through the vilest sort of feminine wiles.
Patrick Merla, my assistant at Saturday Review had suggested me as a co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex. To my surprise I discovered that my co-author was my own therapist, Dr. Charles Silverstein. He said that I could be his collaborator or his patient but not both, so I chose collaborator. We had just three or four months to turn out the book. I remember working so hard that I never had time actually to have sex. I would be describing Anal or Oral Sex and would get so excited but would have no time for anything but Masturbation.
We were a good team. Charles, who’d come out late and moved directly into an affair, then another, knew little about the apparatus of gay life, which I was an expert on, though one of his sidelines was sex therapy (cures for impotence and retarded or premature ejaculation), and he brought that to the table as well as a warm, reassuring personality. I was still cynical and cold from having endured my early years of gay life before the era of self-acceptance. If it had been up to me, the book would have been called The Bleakness of Gay Sex. Charles introduced the right note of physical closeness and emotional intimacy.
For the longest time I thought being gay was a sort of scandal. It seemed deeply unnatural, not only because it did not make babies but also because it seemed to violate anatomical design. Worse, no man had been brought up to take charge at the office but surrender in bed. In the days when I’d gone out with women, everything had seemed easier, more familiar, more reassuring—but, perhaps, too often sickeningly so. In college I’d dated a woman who adored me so much that I found myself preening, glowing with self-satisfaction. I thought that gay life, by contrast, toughened me up for this Spartan, competitive, dangerous activity of being a New York writer.
During the 1970s I began to question many of the basic assumptions of our culture. We now saw that for the thousand-year period before Christ the pagan world had accepted boy love as a viable alternative. In the classical world numerous debates, which in their written form ran to hundreds of pages, had argued the relative merits of heterosexuality and pederasty, with the pederasts usually winning. K. J. Dover, a professor of Greek at St. Andrews who happened to be heterosexual, published in 1978 a careful study of all the actual sex practices and romantic conventions between two males in ancient Greece. Such works, and later Foucault’s History of Sexuality, provided both a long pedigree for male-male sex and dramatic evidence of how much homosexuality differed from epoch to epoch. If there was nothing exclusively natural about heterosexuality, there were also different “homosexualities,” not one homosexuality. This discussion lay at the heart of one of the major culture wars of the 1970s, between essentialists (who thought homosexuality was the same no matter when or where it appeared) and the social constructionists (who thought Alcibiades’ homosexuality bore no resemblance to Michelangelo’s and that his bore no resemblance to mine). Of course you could be a bit of both and claim, as I would, that the rules of homosexuality might be determined by your society (active or passive roles governed by age, bisexuality permitted or not, anal or “intercrural” penetration preferred, same-sex marriage legalized or not), but that the overpowering attraction to a member of the same sex despite rigorous taboos in certain cultures might actually be innate and biologically determined.
These debates that “naturalized” homosexuality (or that at least showed it was omnipresent, eternal) were backed up by new biological studies of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom and new ethnological studies of homosexuality in other cultures. At this time I was beginning to read Foucault. His central idea had a liberating effect on me: that we are all—philosophers, children, and chemical engineers alike—constricted as to what we can think by the prevailing discourses of our period. As he put it, “We cannot think no matter what no matter when” (On ne peut pas penser n’importe quoi n’importe quand). Like me (and it sounds absurdly pretentious to put it that way), Foucault was a positivist who rejected metaphysics and all grand spiritual generalities à la Heidegger or class conspiracies à la Marx. Foucault disliked all general principles and held out for particularities, though he did recognize that at each historical moment people could think only certain thoughts and not others—and that these restrictions applied to the entire population. According to Foucault, no one was immune to the subduing power of discourse.
I felt that in the case of homosexuality no one before 1969 had been able to think of homosexuals as something like a minority group. Before that date there were many competing theories, all dismissive, and in the beginning of Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe), Proust presents at least five etiologies, many of them contradictory. He is obviously caught up in a delirium of theorizing. All other books touching on homosexuality then and later (from André Gide’s Corydon to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room) cannot resist subscribing to a theory; indeed, they seem obliged to theorize. One sign of post-Stonewall liberation is that all this scaffolding of theory has fallen away; now no one friendly to homosexuality feels he or she must explain it, any more than a thinker or writer is forced to explain heterosexuality. Novels and plays treating homosexuality as a theme no longer indulge in presenting the characters’ etiology. Now characters are simply shown inhabiting their difference.
None of these ideas was racing through my head when I coauthored The Joy of Gay Sex, but Charles and I had certainly been influenced by all the intellectual activity bubbling through the Gay Academic Union. What we discovered in working on our book (aimed at an inexperienced young or old man living in the provinces, far from centers of gay sophistication) was that whereas sexual technique and the divide between male and female cultures were the primary problems for heterosexuals, in gay life your partner’s body was no more a mystery than his priorities and patterns of communication. No, the problem was gay life itself—coming out, dealing with religious prejudice, coping with the straight world of employment or with the problems of friendship, housing, and family, and handling such thorny practical and legal problems as how to leave your property to a gay lover. Then there were the lifestyle questions (cruising, “marriage,” fidelity or open relationships, role-playing).
My own problems in dealing with being gay were crippling—I’d devoted decades in therapy to coping with them and as a teenager had often been suicidal. But in our sex manual I decided to take a jaunty, relaxed tone, to “act ahead of my emotions,” as a friend undergoing therapy put it. That I’d turned away from straight therapists trying to cure me to Charles Silverstein, an openly gay man, revealed that even I had been shaped by the new intellectual and cultural currents before I began working on The Joy of Gay Sex.
One of the ironies of writing about such a highly charged subject was that when the book came out, we were criticized within the gay
community for being too conservative, for warning people, for instance, against such potentially damaging and outré practices as fist-fucking, whereas just four years later, when AIDS appeared in 1981, we were accused by that community of having been unalarmed by promiscuity. The idea that we’d erred somehow in not foreseeing an unprecedented disease no scientist in the world had predicted strikes me as bizarre and unfair. The publisher certainly made a mistake, however, in not withdrawing the book immediately and replacing it with an AIDS-conscious edition. It took several years before the book was revised.
I was never quite sure how I felt about having coauthored The Joy of Gay Sex. I discovered that having a “bankable” book made me more attractive to publishers, but its sexual nature turned my name into a bit of a joke. That such a book now existed—and as a companion to the bestselling The Joy of Sex—caused it to count as a liberating publication, and in certain circles I seemed to be striking a blow for gay freedom. Amazingly, no one tried to ban it except in a province of Canada where a lady had thought she was buying The Joy of Cooking and was so horrified by what she found under “chicken” that she convinced the local bookshops to withdraw it from their shelves, a form of de facto censorship that the Candian version of the ACLU instantly and effectively opposed.
Chapter 11
David Kalstone invited me to join him one summer in Venice—then another, then another, on and on for several years. Stan and I had visited Venice that first time, but I hadn’t gone back in ten years. David introduced me to his Italian summer world, which was dolce and soave and raffinato. Funded with a few thousand dollars here and there by the Merrill Foundation, I was able to afford my flight and pocket money, but David paid the rent and financed the major treats, such as dinner once a season at Harry’s Bar and a day beside the Cipriani pool once every week or two. At the pool everyone was so old that Gore Vidal had reputedly referred to it as Lourdes. It was there that Marguerite Littman (an American socialite and AIDS fund-raiser in London whom I interviewed years later) said to Tennessee Williams as they looked at a cadaverous girl shambling past in her bikini, “Look, anorexia nervosa!” to which Williams replied, “Oh, Marguerite, you know everyone.”
