I must admit I was a little leery of reading this book as I had heard a good bit how detailed White was in writing about people in the art scene of New York of the 70's, and I worried that I wouldn't know who half the people he referenced were. However, I was really pleasantly surprised when I received a copy of this book and read it. Yes, White discusses people that I didn’t know, but he does a great job explaining who people were, why they were relevant, and makes his interaction with them (however unknown they may be to the reader) interesting.

This book works on so many different levels, a memoir, a literary history, a culture study, and a travelogue. Edmund White has clearly led an amazing life as he has detailed in previous books, but reading about his early professional years working as a magazine writer and editor is truly fascinating. Who didn’t this man know or work with during the 70’s? In my opinion, a great strength of this book is the job White does capturing the spirit of New York in the 70’s, particularly the gay male culture. I found myself reading it and thinking about the recent documentary film “Gay Sex in the 70’s.” It was an incredible time, and it makes for a story in the life of an incredible writer. ( )

Let me begin by admitting my bias. I have been a fan of Mr. White's work as far back as Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and was privileged to hear Mr. White read from this work before it was published, when he spoke at the Stonewall Library last Spring. So...that out of the way, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, reading it in two sittings, over one weekend.

I've always been fascinated by both gay history and by social commentary. This book combines the best of both these endeavors. White was uniquely positioned to see and comment on the advent of gay liberation, the sexual liberty and excesses of the 70s, and how both of these impacted culture in the gay mecca that was and is New York. White's style in all of this is transcendent, and "user friendly". I found the work far more accessible and far less troubling than his earlier volume of memoirs My Lives. Sadly, the ravages of time and AIDS means that there are few characters who appear in both. But many of my friends, and myself, found White's graphic recounting of his sexual escapades in My Lives troubling, if not downright distasteful. Though I consider myself relatively knowledgeable about this period in gay history, and the denizens who inhabit it, I have to admit that this book sent me scurrying to look up at least a dozen different people who popped up. It's happily led on to further reading by other writers, and Leo Lerman's volume of diaries, The Grand Surprise, is next up on my reading list.

I found this an easier read than some of White's fiction, but no less engaging. but At one point, White observes that "friendship feeds the spirit." So does White's prose.

This vastly entertaining memoir focuses on three scenes from Edmund White's life in the 1960s and '70s: New York City at its depths; the author's life as a gay man; and the literary and artistic crowd that White hung with. These three scenes often intertwine, and when they don't, White jumps agiley from one to another.

This prolific author has given us in years past - in the twenty two books so far to his credit - his coming out story, stories of lustful romps and travels, gay novels and examinations of prominent gay writers. He's not shy, and he seems completely candid in talking about the psyche and the flesh (he is, after all, the co-author of "The Joy of Gay Sex"). This book chooses an era (1960s, 1970s) and a place (New York City) that showcase that candor:

"We tried to trick every night, if we could do it efficiently, but reserved the weekends for our serious hunting sorties. I'd clean my apartment carefully, change the sheets and towels, put a hand towel under the pillow (the 'trick towel' for mopping up the come) along with the tube of lubricant (usually water-soluble K-Y) . . . You'd buy eggs and bacon and jam and bread for toast, if you wanted to prove the next morning that you were 'marriage material'. You'd place an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter on the bedside table. You'd lower the lights and stack the record player with suitable mood music (Peggy Lee, not the Stones) before you headed out on the prowl. All this to prove that you were 'civilized', not just one more voracious two-bit whore."

The era of this book, bifurcated by the Stonewall raid in 1969 that marked the begnning of "gay liberation", was a heady time for gay men. As White relates: "Just as the Crash of 1929 ended the Roaring Twenties, so the AIDS epidemic of 1981 ended the sexy seventies. Sontag once said to me that in all of human history in only one brief period were people free to have sex when and how they wanted - between 1960, with the introduction of the first birth-control pills, and 1981, with the advent of AIDS." That disease took most of White's friends, and he, himself, is positive.

He observes this about gay relationships of those times: "It was as if the three elements (love, sex, friendship) that straight people centered on one other person we gays distributed over several people, and this distribution was a more solid form than companionate marriage." This could only happen, of course, in big cities where there was a plethora of gay folk to fit these many roles. Near the end of the book White observes that by the 1980s gays were seeking to find all three elements in one person.

The cruising and sexual abandon that marked the time of this recollection occurred on the streets, and in the bedrooms, of New York City, then at its nadir. In fact, the book begins this way: "In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stunk during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars."

But New York's failings were forgiven: "New York seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation. To us, however, it represented the only free port on the entire continent. Only in New York could we walk hand in hand with a member of the same sex. Only in New York could we ignore a rat galloping across our path and head out for a midnight play reading."

An editing job took White to San Francisco in 1971 or so. That city, which was just beginning to accumulate credentials to become the gay capital of the world, did not appeal: "[I]t seemed to us as if everyone in San Francisco were [sic] doing yoga and reading Krishnamurti, gardening and obsessing about the presentation of his or her macrobiotic diet on an artfully misshapen, partially glazed Korean kiln-fired plate. We didn't care what we ate or how our chakras were lining up. We were hungry for fame. We wanted to be noticed." He soon happily found his way back to New York.

The artistic and literay scene in New York, heavily populated by gays, was very accessible to White - indeed, he became part of it. He titillates us with gossip and revealing vignettes, but, except for the closeted few, who exasperated him, not in an unkind way. The only two figures he portrays as not nice are Lillian Hellman (a "liar", "an appaling person" and "an old fashioned Stalinist without scruples") and Susan Sontag. Indeed, a failing of the book is the excessive space White devotes to Sontag and his falling out with her. This relationsip clearly absorbed much of his emotional energy at the time, but it is not particulary interesting.

White is a superb writer and imagist. Here he is, for example, describing "grizzled Oxford dons" who were occasionally invited to dinner by a friend:

"All those lonley intellectuals, their eyes hollowed out from years of reading microfiches and medieval script, their voices hoarse from gabbling to themselves over tinned beans and Bovril in unhreated Rooms, were now being stroked and feted and fed. They were like feral cats being tickled behind the ears for the first time. They were purring, though still looking around anxiously for the next boot in the rear, the next nasty review by a rival in the Times Literary Supplement."

The book is full of such delights. I'm ready for his tales of the '80s and 90s.

White's memoir begins when he he arrives in New York City from the Midwest where he followed his lover instead of going on to Harvard. He is is not a writer yet and these two decades are a formative time in his literary career.

As a gay man, White was still hoping to be "cured" as he regularly (like many other gay men at the time) saw a therapist. In 1969, as the gay movement began with Stonewall, White began to embrace his own identity--and he had little choice when, in 1977, he famously co-authored "The Joy of Gay Sex."

The reader is invited to hear White's tales of the famous artists and literary figures he surrounded himself with and his many lovers and experiences before and in the early days of AIDS. This book is gossip and at the same time revelation. This is a social history of New York at that time told by an insider. ( )

Reading City Boy is a bit like sitting down with an old friend one has known for years and still - despite hearing similar stories from him each time you meet - feeling closer to him than ever and realizing how much his friendship means to you. White still has the ability to startle, to come out with some revelation about himself that leaves the reader wondering: "What compelled him to admit that?" We learn from Edmund White: learn to be more honest, more down-to-earth, more tolerant, and more understanding. In City Boy, White's focus changes from the interior to the exterior. Those who read and enjoyed My Lives may be disappointed in City Boy. My Lives was a breathtaking excursion into the life and mind of Edmund White. Each page had the ability to charm or alarm us. City Boy, on the other hand, is more about the world outside, the world of others, the world that White lived in and observed while simultaneously living the life that we all have come to know through his other books. City Boy is an authentic representation of the 60s and 70s and of gay culture during those years, in particular. But if a reader picks up this book hoping for sadly amusing pages about White being led around on a leash or fascinating insights into his real-world relationships with women, one will find City Boy lacking. For someone yearning to have lived through the 60s or 70s and having missed it by a decade or two or three, City Boy should supply a good picture of the times. If someone is seeking a little gossip or some smartly drawn vignettes of famous people, City Boy should please as well. White gives wry observations of James Merrill, Vladimir Nabokov, Jan Morris, John Hohnsbeen, Peggy Guggenheim, William Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Susan Sontag among others. The author who always seems to us as though we've known him forever, this time around has taken the focus outside, writing about the decades he remembers well but through the lens of his movement around the cities: New York, San Francisco, and Paris. As always, White is a class act. At his simplest and least exciting he is always a gentleman, one who deserves the title of "our friend between the covers." ( )