The eight stories in this erotic and heartbreaking collection are barometers of difference. They measure the distance between an American expatriate and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and rough sex; the gulf between a man dying of AIDS and his uncomprehending relatives.
Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind hi...
Originally published in 1982 as the first of Edmund White's trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story became an instant classic for its pioneering portrayal of homosexuality. The book's unnamed narrator, growing up during the 1950s, is beset by aloof parents, a cruel sister, and relen...
Kevin asked in his clear high choirboy voice as soon as he’d finished another set.“Yes,” Guy said, knowing he’d betrayed Andrés with a monosyllable, poor Andrés languishing in that junior high school of a prison, a silly place denuded of thick sweating walls, tiny barred fragments of light, unoil...
Julien had never been to Venice, but he said he was sure it would be “majestueux,” and he was delighted to be going, if only for a week. Although Austin and Julien spent almost every night together, they hadn’t said, “I love you,” nor talked about their future. All along Austin had felt he couldn...
Stan met me at the airport, popped something fun in my mouth, and took me on a tour of all the discos and backroom bars that had opened since Stonewall and my departure. After six or seven months in Italy, starved for sex, I couldn’t believe how unleashed New York had become.For the first time I ...
she asked. She was still half asleep. “I was going to surprise you. We came back a day early.”I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her face. “Oh, I must smell disgusting. I got drunk with Jack. If I’d only known—”“But not at his place, right? Because he didn’t pick up when I phoned.”“No, you’...
"I'm not going to give you a lease because I—" she seemed to be smiling behind her smoked glasses—"I might not like you." I virtually kissed her hand as we left. At that moment I was ready to buff her nails every night and with my own feet pump the iron lung she must sleep in. I convinced myself ...
I had known Ned for ten years in New York and, like many gay men of my generation, had read his Paris Diary. After the war and well into the 1950s Ned had lived in Paris, kept by Marie-Laure, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. She’d died in 1970, long before I arrived in Paris, but among old gay Parisia...