City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s Read Online Free

Although in my own way I, too, was moving toward the personal through my writing, I was never entirely convinced it was the right way. I still idolized difficult modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and I listened with solemn but uncomprehending seriousness to the music of Schoenberg. Later I would learn to pick and choose my idiosyncratic way through the ranks of canonical writers, composers, artists, and filmmakers, but in my twenties I still had an unquestioning admiration for the Great—who were Great precisely because they were Great. Only later would I begin to see the selling of high art as just one moreform of commercialism. In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarmé failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his. If my eyes swooned shut while I read The Sweet Cheat Gone , Proust’s pacing was never called into question, just my intelligence and dedication and sensitivity. And I still entertain these sacralizing preconceptions about high art. I still admire what is difficult, though now I recognize it’s a “period” taste and that my generation was the last to give a damn. Though we were atheists, we were, strangely enough, preparing ourselves for God’s great Quiz Show; we had to know everything because we were convinced we would be tested on it—in our next life.
    In the late sixties I was a living contradiction. I was still a self-hating gay man going to a straight psychotherapist with the intention of being cured and getting married. I had an almost Catholic awe before the whole institution of marriage, which I mocked at the same time. My parents were both Texans, and in one small corner of my mind I silently objected to the way Yankee intellectuals dismissed all Southerners as rednecks. Most of my new friends in New York scoffed at Lyndon Johnson because of his accent, ignoring the value of his Great Society reforms. At Time-Life I would read through Johnson’s off-the-record remarks to journalists in the presidential plane; he’d talk about “niggers” but at the same time he was determined to help black Americans get a good education. Because he used the N-word I believed him.
    I was a nerd and an egghead but I was also going three times a week to the Sheridan Square gym and building up my body. I’d never liked sports and I’d been bad at them in school, but now I was spending hours every week pumping iron. When other men stared at my newly muscular body with lust, I could scarcely breathe. Their attention frightened me, though I sought it.
    As a socialist I longed for the Revolution, but in the meantime I held on to my nine-to-five (or eleven-to-six) office job. And feltbad about it. We “socialists” were so naïve that we thought no one with progressive politics should drive an expensive car or live in a big house; if he did, we accused him of hypocrisy, not realizing that an individual’s personal wealth has no relevance to his politics once he’s freed himself of self-serving arguments. At the same time, ironically, we were so uniformly and unconsciously sexist that we saw nothing strange in that all writers at Time-Life were male and all researchers female.
    One day a top editor, a real New England patrician named Maitland Edey, overheard me and my researcher—and great friend to this day—Sigrid talking about feminism. Edey was genuinely curious about what rights women might still be demanding, and he invited Sigrid and me to a pleasant lunch at the top of the Time-Life Building in a private dining room. Faced with this kindly but starchy and highly skeptical aristocrat, we couldn’t come up with much. I’m sure he was disappointed by our fuzzy, halfhearted observations and was probably convinced by the end of the meal that this new, only half-formulated version of feminism was nothing but empty complaint.
    I thought I wanted to be a serious novelist but I consecrated my days to journalism (for some reason I could never use my empty hours