“What if I could write about my life exactly as it was?” the teenage narrator of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story wonders. “What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?” Published in 1982, A Boy’s Own Story was hailed as one of the first coming-out novels, and its author, who died aged 85 last week, as a great pioneer of gay fiction.
This auto-fiction relates White’s privileged adolescence in 1950s Chicago, his struggles with his sexuality and search for a psychoanalytical “cure”. In its extraordinary candour about sex – a hallmark of White’s prodigious career – the novel remains startling today. It arrived at a pivotal moment in gay history: after the hope of the Stonewall uprising and just before the devastation of Aids, both of which White documented in what became an autobiographical trilogy with The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998).
