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Edmund White’s “ ” opens with the most remarkable account of cruising I know. By I mean a specifically gay male practice of organized promiscuity, a form of sexual sociality at once universal—existing, in remarkably similar forms, in rural American truck stops and among Roman ruins—and, as White chronicles it, specific to a particular time and place, the Chelsea piers in nineteen-seventies New York, part of the extravagant, unprecedented gay world that flourished between the and the onset of the crisis. In the nighttime scene that opens the book, men brush past each other in the dark, alert in their animal bodies, their senses sharpened by hunger; they send up cigarette flares, displaying themselves against the night sky; they pair off or remain solitary, unchosen—like the narrator, who lingers until sunrise, when finally he finds a man to go home with.

It’s a bravura opening; it’s also disorienting, and readers might be forgiven for needing some time to find their footing. This is in part because the novel dispenses with preliminaries: there’s no welcoming exposition, no helpful signposts or introductions, just a nameless, faceless first-person narrator in the grip of an as-yet unexplained desire. What’s more, White’s disarmingly gorgeous prose everywhere works transformations: on just the first page, the rotting industrial warehouse the men populate becomes a theatre, a museum, a cathedral, a bird.



The landscape beyond the river is a body struck by a w.

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