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Portrait of a Sensualist : Novelist Edmund White Looks Past Gay Subculture in His Life, Work

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Times Staff Writer

“A h! Do you have to be sensual to be human?”

“Certainly, Madame. Pity is in the guts, just as tenderness is on the skin.”

--Anatole France, “The Red Lily”

The very sensual Edmund White is eating a bowl of Musli, bananas and strawberries in a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. Graciously, the “foremost American gay novelist,” as one national newsweekly calls him, pours tea for his companion. And sensing a receptive audience of one, he leans in, talks and listens with the familiarity of a close friend. Few would not be receptive to a word-painter whose art has the power to create the scent of sexual longing.

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In “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” (Alfred A. Knopf, $17.95), White’s latest, critically acclaimed autobiographical novel of a young gay man engaged in a tortured and tortuous struggle to accept his sexual identity in the 1950s and ‘60s, he writes:

I was alone with my sexuality, since none of these men spoke to me, nor did I even know their faces, much less their names ... but if I poked my head under the partition and glanced up at them, they’d hide their faces with their hands as a movie star wards off a flash. ...

The day before his Beverly Hills breakfast, White, 47, stands reading these words to an audience of about 50, mostly young men in a Silver Lake bookstore catering to gays, A Different Light.

Most are seated on the floor in front of him. The brown shoe on his right foot wiggles anxiously from side to sole as he scans the crowd; his eyes, magnified behind spectacles, register the approving smiles and nods of the audience. A slight smile plays around the edges of his mouth and he reads on, continuing the X-rated scene of a lonely, self-loathing youth seeking sex with anonymous men in an era before AIDS.

A Hush, Then Applause

There is only White’s voice and the collective breathing of the audience at his feet.

Finished, he is silent, and the quiet yields to applause.

White, on an international book tour to promote “The Beautiful Room,” tells the crowd that he was surprised at the way the “blue-rinsed ladies,” the pillars of Australian and New Zealand society, embraced him and his new book. He had warned them “this is an X-rated reading,” but they loved him, he says, because he writes about the feelings, the inner emotional life of men, in a way that heterosexual men don’t. He writes, they told him, with the emotional subjectivity usually found in the work of women authors.

He continues the theme of the blue-rinsed ladies and their acceptance of him over his Musli.

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“I guess it shows my own prejudice. I think of myself as being a gay writer and I think of gay men liking my work, (but) not even gay women.”

White, who has lived in Paris for the last four years, says “one of the interesting phenomena I’ve discovered in America” is a warming of relations between homosexual men and women and a new attitude by lesbians toward their own sexuality.

“There are a whole new group of young lesbians who are not like the old women-against-pornography lesbians who hated sex, identified with the New Right, the church, anything to stop pornography. But this is a new group of women.”

His eyes quickly scan the dining room and he lowers his voice discreetly to add that these women have taken over the “wildness” of the life style gay men had to give up because of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“San Francisco is having its second Miss Leather contest,” he says with a laugh.

“The whole era of lesbian separatism seems to be ending, at least among the younger women.” And they have “thrown themselves into the struggle against AIDS,” particularly in San Francisco and Washington, “even though lesbians are the group least affected” by AIDS in the society, he points out.

“They have been extraordinarily generous with gay men, who really got to be almost like enemies 10 years ago.”

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He finds all this encouraging, he says, then checks to see if his interviewer’s teacup needs a refill.

Though Newsweek recently proclaimed White “unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist,” it and others have been appropriately quick to point out his work transcends the experiences of America’s gay subculture.

All his work is very “pro-sex,” says White, who has written numerous nonfiction works including “States of Desire: Travels in Gay America” (1980) and “The Joy of Gay Sex” (1977), which he co-authored, as well as the novels “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” (1980), “Forgetting Elena” (1981), “Caracole” (1985), and “A Boy’s Own Story” (1983).

And all his fiction, more than being obviously pro-sex, seem equally to be about love unfulfilled and, even when love is found, obsessive desire.

Doesn’t Mind ‘Gay’ Label

While White welcomes the recent media attention that is propelling him toward crossover status, he does not mind the label “gay writer,” he says. Particularly now that the gay community is so “beleaguered” because of AIDS.

“When I wrote ‘States of Desire,’ which came out in 1980, the gay community was at its peak, extraordinarily strong and confident. And in that climate I felt free to be very critical of the community and to take it to task for being too youth oriented, too materialistic and too snobbish vis-a-vis minority groups, which includes the old, Third World people, black people.

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“There was a lot of snobism in the gay white community--probably no more than in the community at large. But I was disappointed that gays, who themselves had suffered oppression, couldn’t be more generous.”

But now that the gay community is under siege, he adds, “I don’t feel very interested in criticizing it and do feel proud to identify with it.”

Of course, this was not always so. Like the anonymous protagonist of his two most recent novels, he found coming out of the closet an anguish-filled process.

“One of the things I try to emphasize in both ‘A Boy’s Own Story’ and ‘The Beautiful Room Is Empty’ is how isolated the character feels and how immoral . He feels like a free-lancer, in the sense that he doesn’t feel obliged to help or do anything for anybody.”

One of the things that came out of the Gay Liberation movement, White says, “was that gay people felt some sort of attachment to each other.”

Before that, before the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village the night of June 28, 1969, when gays resisted police harassment for the first time, sparking the era of Gay Pride, they had “little self respect” and their only sense of themselves was as neurotics, White says.

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In strictly personal terms, the author says of those times: “I felt I wasn’t attached to anybody or anything and that if other people knew the truth about me they would put me in a mental hospital or a prison. And it was only later, after Stonewall, that I began to feel attached, at least to other gay people.”

Has he answered to his own satisfaction the riddle: Is homosexuality genetic, psychological or social?

A Homophobic Question

“The question is basically homophobic--it’s endlessly intriguing, and we all ask it--but I think that we can’t even explain why people are heterosexual. We can see a good reason why they should be in terms of reproduction, but how did they get to be that way?

“I’ve always thought that our society glorifies women so much--that is the naked body of women-- I can’t understand why all men aren’t straight and all women aren’t lesbians.”

In American society--the Cincinnati native admits to having a love-hate relationship with his country--White blames religion for the nation’s entrenched homophobia.

In other countries, White says, “it’s often that you may feel vaguely uneasy around gay people because you don’t know what they are like or don’t understand them. But you don’t have any ideological objection to them. But in America, because of the power of various Christian churches, people feel justified. They have a whole argument against it.”

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Decries Cultural Ghettoes

He is equally dismayed that the United States, where he will return to teach writing next year at New York’s City College, ghettoizes culture.

“One of the pleasures of living in France is that it is not a ghettoized society. Just taking it from the literary point of view, there is no Arab novel, no black novel, no Jewish novel, no gay novel. Though there are writers in each of those categories writing about those subjects. . . .

“When Simone Signoret wrote a Jewish novel she wouldn’t say ‘I was a Jewish novelist’ the way Saul Bellow might. She would say ‘I’m a French novelist.’

“Black studies, gay studies,” White sighs, calling out the literary ghetto. “The reason a black writer is writing is to communicate to other people, not just other black people. When I read Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son,’ that was the first time I really understood, I thought, something of what it was like to be black.”

Straight Teens Reading Book

“A Boy’s Own Story,” which has been called the best American narrative about male sexual awakening since “Catcher in the Rye,” has sold “150,000 copies in England and I know it’s not just being read by gay people,” he says.

“It’s being read by a lot of heterosexual teen-agers. It’s a big teen-age book there. That’s good. It means that people are having a chance to imagine another life. Here, we all tend to preach to the converted.”

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White is in Paris writing a biography of the late Jean Genet, France’s literary “Black Prince” who created a macabre world of whores, thieves and murderers from the dark pit of his own experience.

Because “The Beautiful Room” ends in 1969, before AIDS began to decimate the gay community, White planned the release of another book called “The Darker Proof” (Plume, $7.95) at about the same time.

“They are (fictional) stories by me and Adam Mars-Jones” about the emotional toll AIDS has taken on the Gay community, he says.

White, who is healthy and happily involved with a “much younger” French man, plans two more novels to complete an autobiographical tetralogy begun with “A Boy’s Own Story.”

But the specter of AIDS makes life for a gay man a roll of the dice.

He’ll complete the four books, he says with a smile, “if I live that long.”

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