Edmund White

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink--The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age. "With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel."--Washington Post book World

A Novel

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Sam Skurka

Until now I'd divided the world into either philistines or aesthetes. The pretensions of the aesthetes convinced no one, me least of all, since most of the jocks who attracted me were philistines. Or perhaps I felt that over here, in America, the aesthetes were weakened, languishing, having strayed too far from the mother ship of Europe. At the same time, I never doubted that the Hammerklavier sonata was superior to "Kitten on the Keys."

"Freud says the writer writes for fame, money, and the love of beautiful women."

"Or men," Maria added. My heart stopped. Was she enlarging the definition to include the goals of women writers or was she suggesting I wanted beautiful men? 

"Or men," I conceded, "though Freud, I'm afraid, didn't encourage women to be very ambitious.'

Maybe that was why the Buddhist doctrine of the non-soul, the anattā, attracted me so much, because it suggested I was potentially everything and actually nothing. I could wake up one morning gay or straight or as nothing, since Buddhism seemed to annihilate such essences. I was afraid to make a choice of any kind.

I had never learned how to groom myself. My mother had ignored the whole issue. In prep school I'd showered because I'd had to, but in college my hygiene and wardrobe had become impressionistic. I was a sleepwalker.

The working world seemed so vulgar and simple-minded that I couldn't imagine why we'd been taught so much Confucius, Kant, and Renoir.

It's not that we start out wanting to appear effeminate. It's that we use effeminacy after the fact as an alibi for our embarrassment, our florid but somehow ill-timed gestures, the bizarre tilt of our heads...

"it's so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life."

"Look at them, Bunny, they're so heroic, these dykes, they don't give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!" and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy,

 "it's so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life."

... For I wasn't enough to understand that a friendship can flourish only if watered by tact and pruned by diplomatic silences.

With a friend we recognize bounds but within those bounds respond with candor; with a lover we expect limitless com- munion but resort to stratagems.

... although I did not believe in Original Sin, only sin, far too common to be original.

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