Review: Jack Holmes & His Friend
Photo: Christopher Street Liberation Day, 1971, via NYPL
Over the years, the novelist, memoirist, cultural critic and literary biographer Edmund White has been vocal about his decision to write from a gay perspective, for a gay audience. In the wake of the AIDS crisis, he became more firmly devoted to this audience, helping to found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and publishing his breakthrough autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story, about growing up gay in the Midwest. Ironically, it was only as he began to focus more exclusively on gay themes that his work became known to straight audiences. In his recent memoir, City Boy, Mr. White wrote about the creative liberation that occurred when he realized, in the late 1970s, that he could create groundbreaking work simply by mining his own autobiography: “A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks.”
