More truth on the homosexual "lifestyle". (In case you missed it, check out the article from the New Oxford Review which we recently highlighted.)
Time Out New York (TONY) magazine interviews Princeton professor Edmund White on his autobiography, My Lives in this week's issue (April 13-19): "The naughty professor: Celebrated gay writer and Princetonian Edmund White gets graphic in his memoir." He proudly describes his "gay" perversions, including his love of S&M and hustlers. From the TONY interview:
There's ... plenty of explicit sex, from his childhood seductions of neighborhood boys in Cincinnati to a rather recent, very complicated S&M affair with a much younger man. ...
TONY: Does it embarrass you at all to write so candidly about your sexual encounters?
EW: ... I love being very honest in my writing. To me, it’s like a sacred obligation, but I’m actually rather reserved in real life.
TONY: You write that you’re a masochist who doesn’t like pain. How does that jibe?
EW: The appeal for me is more about the rituals and the humiliation, which is mostly verbal. It’s a game, I suppose, but a serious game that touches many deep feelings. People who genuinely like receiving or inflicting real pain are very much in the minority, even among the S&M crowd.
TONY: One of the chapters in your book is called “My Hustlers.” Do rent boys play an important part in your life?
EW: I’ve always liked them, and they are very convenient in some ways. If you want to make yourself stay home and write, you just order somebody to come up at midnight. And they’re usually cheaper than what it costs to go out on a date.
It's not surprising that White had horrible relations with his parents. The Princeton WeeklBulletin writes:
As a writer on the vanguard of the gay rights movement, White felt the book needed “a lot more about relationships and sex and probably a little less about the professional details of my career.” There are some graphic scenes depicting White’s sex life, but the most compelling parts of the book are his characterizations of his parents: his mother, a squat, overdressed Texan whose “egotism and incessant chatter could be truly punishing;” and his father, a tyrannical, reclusive misanthrope whose son failed to interest him.
“I tried to portray them as honestly as I could, but it was painful going back into all that stuff, especially the chapter on my father. I never really let myself think that much about it,” said White, whose parents died more than a decade ago. He worried about his sister’s reaction to the book, but “after she read it, she said, ‘Oh God, you let our parents off so lightly. They were much more monstrous than that.’ ” [emphasis added]
