A Boy's Own Story

What a lovely gay novel! I somehow have never read this and am glad I read it now. It feels a little dated but also excellent and very honest.

The part I find strangest is how the novel is simultaneously very personal and yet tells us so little about the narrator. There's such an ironic remove! I don't think it's intentional, either, particularly the last scene with his betrayal of a lover. I think he's genuinely confessing a real regretted moment in his life. (The afterword 20 years later confirms this). Also the book is full of personal remembrances, both factual and emotional, and they all ring true and honest.

And yet I feel like the author has protected himself through the whole book, that there's this distance. My best guess is that it's the writing style. White's prose is highly ornamented and stylized, really intensely written. It works, it doesn't seem pretentious, but it is very wrought. So maybe that's part of the distancing. The other element is something White also mentions in his afterword. The book is framed as fiction, indeed is fictionalized in some ways, so even though it's obviously autobiographical it's not quite a personal memoir or confessional but a cleaned up one.

Another thing I want to highlight, the frank addressing of children's sexuality. He's describing his sexual experiences from when he was as young as 14 and talks about some predating that. That's pretty much taboo in 2020s writing under the admirable goal of avoiding harmful sexualization of children. But that taboo also robs gay men of a big part of their own stories. Our sexuality develops around puberty just like straight kids and gay kids have sex much younger than the officially sanctioned age 18. I appreciated reading a direct reminiscence of White's own experiences of that. It doesn't come off as creepy at all, just honest. Although also sad given how enrobed so much of it was in homophobia and internalized homophobia.

One last thought was how much this narrative reminds me of Gore Vidal or William S Burroughs, other great gay authors of just half a generation or so older than White. Mostly for the patrician white maleness of it, the boarding schools, the upper class environments, the sense of the world belonging to you even if you also felt like an outsider. I'm grateful for all the diversity of modern queer writing, it'd be very boring if all we got was this privileged white viewpoint. But this viewpoint is valid too, and also queer, and to be honest is closer to my own history than others. I enjoyed reading it.