City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [1]
We kept asking in 1972 and 1973 when the seventies were going to begin…
Then again we had to admit the sixties hadn’t really begun until the Beatles came over to the States in 1964, but after that the decade took on a real, definite personality—protest movements, long hair, love, drugs, a euphoria that turned sour only toward the end of 1969. Of course for Leftists the decade began with the Brown v. Board of Education decision and ended with Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
I suppose people hadn’t really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s—progressive and an atheist. But at that time it seemed more a question of generations—one belonged to the generation of “superfluous men,” for instance, or one was a frivolous, self-indulgent product of the Belle Époque. But certainly in the 1920s, as the idea of the modern became current, every amateur sociologist began to seek out the personality of the dawning decade.
In retrospect we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the Feminine Mystique. I lived through the fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening—the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone deafness to the social injustice all around us—seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent. Somehow we’d all been led to think that the order of things in the fifties was “natural,” eternal and unchanging. The cult books of that epoch were The Lonely Crowd and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
The great triumph of the sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the sixties.
At the end of the 1970s I wrote, “There was no style for the decade, no flair, no slogans. The mistake we made was that we were all looking for something as startling as the Beatles, acid, Pop Art, hippies and radical politics. What actually set in was a painful and unexpected working out of the terms the Sixties had so blithely tossed off.”
Chapter 2
I had majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan and I’d been accepted at Harvard to do a Ph.D. in the language. But then I’d pursued a boy I was in love with, Stan, to New York instead. Stan was a junior but had been lured to New York with dreams of becoming an actor. I arrived on July 19, 1962.
I wasn’t really suited for any kind of work except journalism. I’d edited the campus literary magazine at the University of Michigan and thought that somehow I could turn that experience into a job. I had no connections in New York. I had no money beyond the two hundred dollars I’d earned during the month of June delivering eggs and fruit juice in Des Plaines, a desolate suburb of Chicago. On July 19, Stan’s birthday, I decided I had to fly to New York to join him. My sister and mother always later claimed that I’d flown to New York first-class, but that was just more family mythmaking.
I stayed at the Sixty-third Street YMCA, which in those days was pretty much a fairy palace, full of transient and permanent gay residents. It was (and is) a mock-Moorish fantasy of tile work and low ceilings, as well as a giant swimming pool where Tennessee Williams was often sighted. The residential floors were really like a giant sauna. Every time I’d emerge from my room to take a shower, even if it was at two A.M. on a stifling night, a grizzled, potbellied resident would come