For more than 30 years, Edmund White
has chronicled the agonies and ecstasies of gay American life. He was present
throughout the heady days of Gay Liberation, the continuing terror of the AIDS
crisis, and the movement of a maligned and marginalized sexuality into the
mainstream of contemporary pop culture. The backward-looking tendency of
his fiction has helped to make sense of the rapid changes of the past
half-century. A Boy’s Own Story (1982) envisioned furtive frolics and
the labyrinthine networks of pre-Stonewall closets from the vantage point of
the 1970s’ sexual revolution. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) waxed
with nostalgia for that sexual revolution as the community that liberation
built was decimated by disease. The Farewell Symphony (1997) confronted
our community’s loss while demonstrating the incredible dedication with which
gay lovers and friends cared for their own.
White’s latest novel, Our Young
Man, sweeps back across those past four decades. The protagonist, Guy,
makes his way from working-class French origins in Clermont-Ferrand to in-crowd
fame as a model in the go-go Manhattan of the 1980s. Along the way, he becomes
one of the more desirable bodies to dot the gay beaches of Fire Island and the
streets of the city. He juggles three lovers: Fred, the blaxploitation film
producer who bequeaths Guy estates in Fire Island and Manhattan’s West Village
after he dies of AIDS; Andrés, a much fetishized Colombian art-history grad
student who forges artwork to keep up with Guy’s high-fashion lifestyle; and
Kevin, a young college-aged naïf who steps in while Andrés toughs it out in
prison. Through the experiences of these characters, readers travel the
familiar road of White’s concerns: his abiding interest in the themes of betrayal
and abjection — the clearest marks of Jean Genet’s influence on his work — his
Francophilic rejection of American culture as immature and provincial, and his
celebration of gay sex. As usual, we’re also privy to White’s astute
observations of the promises and pains of gay life as it is lived by the
blessed, bleached denizens of New York.
Our Young Man treads new ground in witnessing the author’s confrontation
with the ravages of aging. This in itself is a common theme in gay literature,
but White explores it here with much more energy and poignancy than in prior
works. Both the book and the theme are anchored by Guy, whose livelihood and
relationships require him to lie about his age and fight constantly against the
passage of time. Our Young Man seems especially interested in exploring
romantic coupling as a figure for sex, love, and desperately sought security.
And yet, the novel and the protagonist remain deeply suspicious about the
couple as a retrograde (read: middle-class heterosexual) romantic fantasy. When
Guy refers to Andrés as his “husband” before the latter is sent to jail for
forgery, “something about the word […] roused him to new heights of ecstasy […]
understanding the meaning of each kiss, each hug, each thrust.” Yet, after a
long romance with Kevin, which Guy considers as his last chance for love and
youthfulness, the protagonist can’t help but think that “it [was] awfully
middle-class to be half of a couple.” This negative view is ultimately revealed
to be little more than idealistic posturing, as Guy later admits: “[I]t made
him uncomfortable to have someone so visibly stake a claim on him […] yet he
found the idea reassuring, too.” More importantly, for someone always wondering
“who will be with me at the hour of my death,” the romantic couple always
offers the possibility of ultimate security, of “being held in someone’s arms,
like being shielded from death.”
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