City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [67]
Frank Taylor had been married and had four sons. He had been the editor in chief of McGraw-Hill, had accompanied Nixon to China, and had produced the Arthur Miller–scripted movie The Misfits—and only recently had he come out. He was in his sixties when he went into his first gay bar, Uncle Paul’s on Christopher Street. There he’d seen a young man he thought was attractive, but the whole idea of approaching the fellow terrified him. At last, on his way out, he handed his card to the guy, who said, “But I’ve been in love with you since I was nine.”
When he was a child, this young man’s parents had written mysteries under a pseudonym. They were Frank’s authors, and once during a visit with them at their home he’d met their little boy, who was visibly upset, frightened because he was about to be operated on for a bad heart. “You put me on your knee,” the young man told Frank in Uncle Paul’s, “and very calmly explained everything to me about my heart in scientific detail. And that’s when I fell in love with you.” The Frank I met in New York in the 1970s was already the happily-in-love Frank I’d later catch sight of in Key West in the 1980s accompanied by this same young man.
Now Frank asked me to write sample entries for The Joy of Gay Sex: on something hard (sadomasochism), something soft (kissing), something technical (cruising), and something psychological (coming out).
For me that kind of writing assignment felt like Method acting. I first had to establish who I was. In this case I thought someone kind but with an edge, someone worldly but patient, someone breezy most of the time but capable of being solemn. A slightly less clever but still amusing version of Cocteau, I thought. Someone who can whip off an epigram but is never a bitch, who thinks in paradoxes but doesn’t insist you admire his wit. Just as pianists talked about something mysterious to nonmusicians called attack, I had to scrunch around on my stool while stoking (today we’d say “programming”) my head with just the right elements of worldliness and compassion and reassuring didacticism. Then the writing went quite easily—as well it might, since I couldn’t take it too seriously at the risk of seeming preposterous in my own eyes. It was that rarest and most agreeable thing of all for a writer: an assignment.
But I did take the project seriously because I wanted to escape the living death of the chemical company. As a writer I enjoyed competing with other contenders, especially since I didn’t know the names of any of my rivals for The Joy of Gay Sex. Part of me—most of me!—was frightened, however, of doing something so tacky, and to this day I wince when I’m introduced as a reader at an Ivy League university, say, and the presenter makes a meal out of this particular title. (“Tonight we have with us the only”—chuckle, chuckle—“actual sex symbol I’ve ever met,” har-har. “He is the coauthor of The Joy of”—heh-heh—“Gay Sex”.) Back then, with just Forgetting Elena to my credit, along with a growing list of Time-Life Books I’d written or partially written, such as an anthropological look at Homo erectus called The First Men (har-har), or one about the Hindenburg (When Zeppelins Flew!), not to mention my forty-page LP-accompanying bios of Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Handel, and other composers, I was afraid my fragile literary “career