City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [70]
One of the ironies of writing about such a highly charged subject was that when the book came out, we were criticized within the gay community for being too conservative, for warning people, for instance, against such potentially damaging and outré practices as fist-fucking, whereas just four years later, when AIDS appeared in 1981, we were accused by that community of having been unalarmed by promiscuity. The idea that we’d erred somehow in not foreseeing an unprecedented disease no scientist in the world had predicted strikes me as bizarre and unfair. The publisher certainly made a mistake, however, in not withdrawing the book immediately and replacing it with an AIDS-conscious edition. It took several years before the book was revised.
I was never quite sure how I felt about having coauthored The Joy of Gay Sex. I discovered that having a “bankable” book made me more attractive to publishers, but its sexual nature turned my name into a bit of a joke. That such a book now existed—and as a companion to the bestselling The Joy of Sex—caused it to count as a liberating publication, and in certain circles I seemed to be striking a blow for gay freedom. Amazingly, no one tried to ban it except in a province of Canada where a lady had thought she was buying The Joy of Cooking and was so horrified by what she found under “chicken” that she convinced the local bookshops to withdraw it from their shelves, a form of de facto censorship that the Candian version of the ACLU instantly and effectively opposed.
Chapter 11
David Kalstone invited me to join him one summer in Venice—then another, then another, on and on for several years. Stan and I had visited Venice that first time, but I hadn’t gone back in ten years. David introduced me to his Italian summer world, which was dolce and soave and raffinato. Funded with a few thousand dollars here and there by the Merrill Foundation, I was able to afford my flight and pocket money, but David paid the rent and financed the major treats, such as dinner once a season at Harry’s Bar and a day beside the Cipriani pool once every week or two. At the pool everyone was so old that Gore Vidal had reputedly referred to it as Lourdes. It was there that Marguerite Littman (an American socialite and AIDS fund-raiser in London whom I interviewed years later) said to Tennessee Williams as they looked at a cadaverous girl shambling past in her bikini, “Look, anorexia nervosa!” to which Williams replied, “Oh, Marguerite, you know everyone.”
At Harry’s Bar the waiters were like characters in Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, whirling chairs through the air and posing them beside an already crowded table or catching plates of pasta hurled out of the kitchen and rushing them upstairs (social hell) or to the backroom on the main floor (purgatory) or to the front room (heaven). There in heaven we’d see, sitting by the front door every time, a couple of elderly gay men from Kansas who came bedizened with their heavy gold necklaces (David called them “the chain gang”). They never spoke to anyone or to each other, but just sat there at the price of hundreds of dollars an hour absorbing old-fashioned gin martinis and looking on at each arrival and departure with all the attention they’d lavish on pigeons in San Marco. There we once saw Lady Diana Cooper, ancient but with startling sapphire eyes (David would have marked the word sapphire in my manuscript and then written in the margin, “The sin of aristocratic admiration,” which he considered a failure of taste as much as a breach in style). She and her husband, Duff Cooper, the British ambassador, had been the social leaders of postwar