City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [68]
I was the writer selected for the project and I was able to quit my job. I didn’t have the nerve to tell my dragon-lady boss about the exact nature of my new assignment. I just said I had a big book contract and put in my notice. Bertha Harris, the literary half of The Joy of Lesbian Sex team, and I used to joke that if we were ever interviewed on television and asked why we wrote sex manuals, we’d say, “For the sake of our children,” since she had a teenage daughter to support and I had my nephew.
At first my boss was panicked because she thought she’d be overwhelmed by work, but she quickly became sly and suspicious and had me barred from my office before the two weeks’ notice period was up. She had not liked me ever since the CEO of the company had praised a brief, clear paraphrase I’d done of a sociological book he was supposed to read, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. She’d become one of the only female officers of the company by being cunning, not through intelligence. So many of the women who succeeded before the feminist era were truly loathsome. They knew they were tokens and were never given any real power, and they maintained their positions through the vilest sort of feminine wiles.
Patrick Merla, my assistant at Saturday Review had suggested me as a co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex. To my surprise I discovered that my co-author was my own therapist, Dr. Charles Silverstein. He said that I could be his collaborator or his patient but not both, so I chose collaborator. We had just three or four months to turn out the book. I remember working so hard that I never had time actually to have sex. I would be describing Anal or Oral Sex and would get so excited but would have no time for anything but Masturbation.
We were a good team. Charles, who’d come out late and moved directly into an affair, then another, knew little about the apparatus of gay life, which I was an expert on, though one of his sidelines was sex therapy (cures for impotence and retarded or premature ejaculation), and he brought that to the table as well as a warm, reassuring personality. I was still cynical and cold from having endured my early years of gay life before the era of self-acceptance. If it had been up to me, the book would have been called The Bleakness of Gay Sex. Charles introduced the right note of physical closeness and emotional intimacy.
For the longest time I thought being gay was a sort of scandal. It seemed deeply unnatural, not only because it did not make babies but also because it seemed to violate anatomical design. Worse, no man had been brought up to take charge at the office but surrender in bed. In the days when I’d gone out with women, everything had seemed easier, more familiar, more reassuring—but, perhaps, too often sickeningly so. In college I’d dated a woman who adored me so much that I found myself preening, glowing with self-satisfaction. I thought that gay life, by contrast, toughened me up for this Spartan, competitive, dangerous activity of being a New York writer.
During the 1970s I began to question many of the basic assumptions of our culture. We now saw that for the thousand-year period before Christ the pagan world had accepted boy love as a viable alternative. In the classical world numerous debates, which in their written form ran to hundreds of pages, had argued the relative merits of heterosexuality and pederasty, with the pederasts usually winning. K. J. Dover, a professor of Greek at St. Andrews who happened to be heterosexual, published in 1978 a careful study of all the actual sex practices and romantic conventions between two males in ancient Greece. Such works, and later Foucault’s History of Sexuality, provided both a long pedigree for male-male sex and dramatic evidence of how much homosexuality differed from epoch to epoch. If there was nothing exclusively