Name: The Beautiful Room is Empty
ISBN: 9780679755401

Edmund White

A young gay man experiences the pain of growing out of adolescence and struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality and his desire for power as society moves from the constrained 1950s to the expressive 1960s. Reprint.

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.

Falling in love is slightly embarrassing beacause love is a conspicuous and weighty thing.

"There's nothing secure about suffering," she said.

Exceptional and personal experience of the time before Stonewall Uprising.

Kevin Bertolero

White is so brutally honest about what growing up gay was like in the pre-Stonewall era, so much so that it actually makes for a pretty depressing read. This book is so unashamedly proud, even when it has no right to be, and I think this is why I found it so compelling. The protagonist documents his affairs with a number of men, and with each one, I can see him slowly figuring out who he is, and where his community is, even if those around him fail to see these changes happening. At the end of the book, White writes, 

"Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid. I had an urge to be responsible and disperse the crowd peacefully, send everyone home. After all what were we protesting? Our right to our 'pathetic malady'?...Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis." (225-6)

It's makes me so happy to see how far the LGBT community has come, and how much we've grown in the 47 years since the Stonewall Riots, to know that White's "someday" is actually here. This book was much better than the first in the trilogy, and I can't wait to start reading "The Farewell Symphony" to see how the protagonist's story will end.