City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s by Edmund White
A Book Review
At the back of my edition of ‘City Boy’ is a Q & A with the author where he is asked if another memoir is necessary after four autobiographical novels and one actual autobiography. The answer is both yes and no.
In actual fact, ‘City Boy’ is is not just another White autobiography but is a memoir of New York City during the 60s and 70s, a remarkable time in the city’s history.
In the 60s and 70s, New York was a bankrupt, dirty and dangerous city where no respectable person would choose to live. This made it a mecca for a creative intellectual class to make it their own. Although not a principle player in this creative melee, he knew the likes of Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, Japser Johns, John Ashbery amongst a huge list of names that he frequently likes to drop throughout the book.
This bohemian atmosphere of New York meant that gay men were relatively free to live open lives. As a piece of gay social history, ‘City Boy’ is incredibly illuminating. White chronicles the nascent New York gay scene and even witnessed the Stonewall riots. Interestingly pre-Stonewall, according to White there was no sense of a gay identity or a defined gay culture. Post-Stonewall with the growing militancy and advocacy for rights, there began to develop a shared sense community amongst gay men.
As a social history and a memoir of the city this is great book. However there are certain weak passages where White gets caught in his own reflection, moving away from his true subject New York to his favourite subject: himself. There is a long, fairly irrelevant section where he writes about Venice and details his time in Rome and San Francisco. While his adventures in Italy and the West Coast are include some incident, they do not belong in this book. Similarly the endless name dropping of long forgotten writers, academics and so forth does begin to grate.
I would recommend this book for anyone who loves New York and who wants to understand what it was really like before it became a gilded playground for the super rich. Similarly if you are interested in the artistic milieu of the 60s and 70s and want to read some scurrilous gossip about some eminent figures, then this is the book for you.
