In the ’70s, All New York Seemed Young and Gay
By DWIGHT GARNER in The New York Times, Published: September 29, 2009
The Stonewall riots in 1969 changed almost everything about gay life in New York City, and that famous event is now, in one respect, like Woodstock: far more people claim to have been there than actually were.

Photo of Edmund White by Frank Mullaney
CITY BOY
My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s
By Edmund White
297 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.

In all of the gonzo testimony about Stonewall, however, no reaction to the rioting has struck me as being so painfully honest (or so funny) as the novelist Edmund White’s. He was there at the Stonewall Inn when it erupted, he writes in his new memoir, “City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s.” And when all hell broke loose, his initial response was to sit and stew and cluck.
“I thought we shouldn’t create a fuss,” he admits. “This was bad for our image. I said out loud, ‘Oh, come on, guys.’ ”
That “Oh, come on, guys” moment is put into painful and complicated perspective in “City Boy.” Mr. White had arrived in Manhattan from the Midwest seven years earlier, in 1962, spurning a chance at a Harvard Ph.D. to follow a lover.
“I was a living contradiction,” Mr. White writes. “I was still a self-hating gay man going to a straight psychotherapist with the intention of getting cured and getting married.” He adds, “There was no ‘gay pride’ back then — there was only gay fear and gay isolation and gay distrust and gay self-hatred.”
“City Boy” quickly becomes an open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early ’70s: crime, graffiti, garbage in the streets, Steppenwolf and Foghat leaking out of car tape decks, gay men wearing whistles around their necks to summon help when ambushed by gangs. These bad old days morphed into a star-spangled gay coming of age in the decade after Stonewall. Gay men could chuck those whistles. They were taking judo classes and becoming buff, striding armies of one.
Mr. White was there when the sexual piñata ripped open, and he collected his share of the goodies. In his previous memoir, “My Lives” (2006), he happily over-shared about things like his boundless appetite for male prostitutes, whom he ordered to his door like so many steaming boxes of pizza. In “City Boy” he remains a shock-and-awe exhibitionist.
More at NYT.