1982. Book: A Boy’s Own Story. Edmund White.
Edmund White’s novel is an important new work about American gay adolescence. Set in the mid-West of the 1950’s, the book is written from the perspective of the narrator looking back on his early teens and traces the development of his gay identity.
It may comes as a shock to find the hero fucking with a twelve-year old or hustling on street corners but then White tends to savage American myths rather than create them.
White has acknowledged that the novel is broadly autobiographical; in particular the relationship between the boy and his divorced parents mirrors his own experience. The boy’s adolescence is largely unhappy and insecure. White also outlines the homophobic and anti-Communist attitudes of the time.
The boy has to deal with sexual experience and feelings that confuse and disturb him. White does not sentimentalise his youth but shows us how a growing self-awareness develops within the boy.
Review by Nigel Leach, published in Gay East Midlands, November 1983.
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