Further Progress of a Gay Pilgrim : THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY <i> by Edmund White (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95; 216 pp.)</i>

“I was a sissy. My hands were always in the air,” says Edmund White’s young gay hero in “A Boy’s Own Story,” published in 1982. “My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d sat not cross-legged on the gym floor but resting on one hand and hip like the White Rock Girl.”

The youth’s story, an archetype of a generation’s experience, continues in White’s new novel, “The Beautiful Room Is Empty.” The time is the ‘50s and ‘60s (“the three most heinous crimes known to man were communism, heroin addiction, and homosexuality.”) The scene shifts from the Midwest to Greenwich Village.

Friends become significant figures in the boy’s life. Although she was a Communist, Maria, a lesbian artist, “liked the songs of Noel Coward, Mabel Mercer, and Marlene Dietrich.” Tex, who runs a bookstore, ushers the youth into a sense of the “gay world,” which stirs feelings of “half-thrill and half-fear.” Another friend, William Everett Hunton, “would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students.” Lou, with whom he finds sex is never love, recognizes “as everyone had to, that homosexuality was sick; in fact, he insisted on the sickness.”

The protagonist’s relations with his father were never easy, “his anger between us, mysterious as the stone the Muslims worship.” His mother, divorced, worries about what will happen to him: “All your fine gifts of mind will be destroyed, your reputation and character.” His therapist warns that homosexuality will condemn him to an embalmed adolescence. He engages in sustained “tearoom” sex in public toilets, but finds this a “long sentence” that leads to feeling “full of self-hatred.”

Finally, he falls in love with Sean, whose hair resembles a hay mow. But Sean doesn’t really want to be gay, and drops out. “The joke was that the great love of my life was for a man who knew nothing about me and next to nothing about himself.”

The storytelling is compelling, and White’s imagery is vivid, his prose a fresh delight. At the end of the novel, the youth comes to a turning point, prepares to exchange past victimization for a new, untried identity as a contemporary gay man. The dramatic climax is New York’s Stonewall riot, a watershed of gay activism.

I look forward with interest to the appearance of a third, perhaps even a fourth novel in White’s developing, engrossing work.