From Interiors, a portfolio by Claudia Keep in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review.
In my novels and memoirs I have written quite a bit about sex, even very outré sex. I’ve always insisted that I’ve approached sex as a realist, not as a pornographer. That is, I like to represent what goes through someone’s mind while having sex—the idle thoughts, the resentful thoughts, the comic aspects of the body failing to meet the acrobatic ambitions of the imagination—and the sometimes enriching, sometimes embarrassing or dull, often distracting or irrelevant or wonderfully intimate and tender moments of lovemaking.
I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me it would be thousands of sex partners.
There is still a prudishness about sex, not only in America but everywhere. Sex and comedy are the two subjects that are never taken seriously, though we think about sex constantly—and about comedy periodically, if we’re lucky, if only in the form of self-satire. I suppose prudishness guarantees paternity, so crucial in keeping bloodlines pure.
Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now that they are getting married and fathering offspring. Paternity is not the problem for them so much as respectability. Internet anonymity has facilitated new possibilities of “cheating” and hypocrisy.
It may seem absurd for an octogenarian to be writing a sex memoir, but it could be argued that he has decades of experience to draw on and an unimpeachable point of view, even if the horse he has in the race may have become feeble and hobbled. Because I am in my eighties, have most of my marbles, have been a practicing gay since age thirteen, and lived through the oppression of the fifties, the post-Stonewall exaltation of the seventies and the wipeout after the advent of AIDS in the eighties, the discovery of the lifesaving therapies of the nineties, the granting of gay marriage equal rights in the States in 2015 and the parallel right to adopt children, the brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labeled “woke” (trans people, drag, books, puberty-delaying drugs)—because I’ve witnessed all this drama and melodrama—I’m perfectly situated to view how we got here. The following piece is adapted from one of the chapters of my forthcoming memoir, The Loves of My Life.
The thing about gay life is that you have countless mini-adventures, which years later leave only the faintest grooves on your cortex. The handsome big blond with the sweetest smile and strongest Boston accent I’d ever heard, who wanted to get fucked only and moved out to San Diego, where he caught the eye of many a sailor, got infected with AIDS, and died.
The young Kennedy-style gay politician whom I invited to dinner after yet another bad affair, on the principle that I should shoot high and aim for the top. He came to dinner more than once, we had “sophisticated” (i.e., cold) sex, and he got AIDS and died.
My French translator, a skinny boy with an enormous dick and fat lips and an encyclopedic knowledge of the French classics from Rabelais to Benjamin Constant, called on me in New York and I immediately groped him—which he thought (rightfully) was disrespectful and unprofessional. I couldn’t explain to him how every male in New York was fair game. He got AIDS and died.
Bruce Chatwin. Robert Mapplethorpe sent Bruce over to visit me and we were still standing in the doorway when we started groping each other. I saw him many times after that, in London and Paris, but we never fooled around again. We had gotten that out of the way. Years later he contracted AIDS and died but couldn’t accept that he had such a banal disease and claimed he’d contracted a rare malady in China from whale meat or something. Maybe the subterfuge was caused by his being married to a woman.
The dear friend of mine who knew I was not-so-secretly lusting after him and, one afternoon in Maine, in an exquisite house built by Buddhist monks after their abbot had disbanded them, came into my room after a shower wrapped in a towel and asked for a back rub. I gave him a blowjob. That silent concession sealed our friendship and I never plagued him again. I wish I’d been that generous with older unattractive friends who lusted after me when I was young.
The doughy blond trick my age, thirty at the time, who spent the night gabbing with me after we had desultory sex. At dawn I said to him, “I’ll bet you were raised a Christian Scientist, as I was.” He asked me how I’d figured that out. “Because,” I said, “you’re an optimist and don’t seem to believe in evil. That’s such a fundamental part of Mary Baker Eddy’s beliefs—and her most unsettling error. Worse than her distrust of medicine.”
***
I was raped two or three times by clever older men, although we didn’t call it rape then. Only later did I realize I’d been fucked against my will. One importunate man was an English television producer with whom I’d spent many a social evening in London and New York. He was the sort of stereotypical P. G. Wodehouse gentleman who’d suddenly stop in the middle of the sidewalk, let his eyes dramatically unfocus as if he were having an attack of aphasia, and actually say with perfect articulation, and a look of astonished disbelief, “What?!”
Maybe an Englishman would have known how to reply, but I was disarmed, nonplussed. He invited himself up to my cockroach-infested, mold-in-the-coffee-cup studio apartment, despite my objections. I could dress myself presentably but my apartment revealed the depths of my poverty. Within seconds he’d wrestled me to the broken-back cot with the dirty sheets and peeled off my jeans and underpants and stuck his cock into my hole. He later told several mutual friends he’d never seen such abject squalor before. The next morning my rectum hurt, but I thought nothing more of it.
Another Englishman, a Cambridge don who was an authority on Arabic literature and who was visiting my university for a term, invited me to his apartment, got me drunk on martinis, and soon had my rump in the air, my legs bent back; after feasting on my hole he plunged into it and left me bleeding and unsatisfied on his bed. He put on his robe, washed away the blood and feces, went into the sitting room, made a cup of tea for himself, and took up a book. I pulled myself together and slunk away. For years afterward I bragged that I knew him.
There was a close friend of mine in London with an unheated apartment near Bond Street, in which I stayed in the sixties countless times. In 1970, when I lived in Rome, John came to visit me for a few weeks. He was what I called in those days “a character.” He hated the royal family with a passion. He seemed terribly repressed and proper, but when a lover told him, while they were driving through Scotland, that he was leaving him, John said in a clipped voice, “Very well,” turned the wheel, and drove them off a cliff. They both spent the next year in full-body casts. John had his nose broken and remade several times but he was never quite satisfied with it. Every morning he’d make tea and listen to the “wireless” chat shows, including the Woman’s Hour. He knew every bus route in London and even their late-night schedules. He was good at living on nothing a year; he made orange juice from powder in water. He ate something called cheesed cauliflower. He said ate as “et.”
Everything in London was foreign, starting with the fat, stubby key pushed into a low lock on the outer door—the “Chubb key.” We would take the tube to Hampstead Heath, past the house where he said Rudolf Nureyev lived with his lover, Peter O’Toole (or was it Terence Stamp? Probably neither). We ran about among the trees and bushes on the Heath, like the “mad things” we were. I wished my host, who was short and snug in his jeans and black leather jacket, wouldn’t speak in such a deep, camp voice (he was a trained actor) or refer to me as “Miss Thing.” We were just sliding out of the era of heavy-drinking Tallulah impersonators into the pot-smoking Village People period of the weight-lifting, hypermasculine clone. I lifted weights, and John told me that was unhealthy and that later it would all turn to lard, which was true. The first time I saw a mustache in a gay bar I said to my cruising buddy, “Eeeww … I’d never kiss a man with a mustache, would you?” Six weeks later we both had them.
I would do anything, look any way, that would get me laid. I couldn’t believe guys years later would advertise themselves by the boot brand or high-tops they wore. In France I remember men saying they were style santiags (cowboy boots) or crade (unwashed). Wasn’t the body or even the personality under the look more important than the accessories? I would wear anything from a red hankie back-left pocket (aggressive penetrator) to yellow back-right (piss swallower), if I thought someone, anyone, would like that. I suppose I believed one’s essence was enduring and unshod and of a neutral color and that accessories, so important to the poor and young, were immaterial.
I must have felt or been felt by hundreds of men on the Heath; I particularly liked deep soul kissing with a mustachioed stranger as the wind blew through our hair and the leaves above us shivered and the swift-moving clouds obscured the moon and stars. “Are you there, Miss Thing? Ready to go?” that bass, highly inflected voice would ask out of the darkness.
Daring myself, I asked the tall, slender, impossibly young man in my arms (he smelled of good soap) if he’d like to come home with us; our “flat” was on Marylebone High Street (which I’d learned to call “Marl-bun”). He said yes and my host, John, who resented snooty boys from Oxford and thought aristocrats should be beheaded, seemed a bit grim as we walked (downhill) all the way from Hampstead to Bond Street. Every hundred paces the Oxonian and I would stop a second to “snog,” much to John’s irritation, and the snooty trick never drew a breath, and kept talking about the beauties of “Keys,” which I finally understood was his college, Caius, at Oxford. At last we were in bed and he was “good value” as a sexual partner—lithe, loving, versatile. In the morning I asked him if he wanted a “scone,” which I pronounced as it was written.
He said, “I can’t bear to think I shared a bed with someone who speaks like that.”
“How should it be said?”
“Skun.”
***
A young, slender redhead, taller than I was, came up to me at a trendy East Village café, the KGB, which was on the second floor, up a long, perilous staircase, and said in a deep voice, “Mr. White, I’d like to interview you about intergenerational sex. Would that be possible?”
“You bet,” I said, feeling like a starving dog at the door to a meat locker. It was 1985 and I was forty-five.
He was someone I would have been attracted to even in my first youth, when I was cute and picky. Well, to be honest, not so picky, since I scored with someone every night.
We made a date at my place for dinner, one I prepared with loving care. My Paris trainer used to say if you give anyone enough wine and pass the poppers, you can get him. I guess I’m too romantic for thinking about seduction techniques. I try never to impose myself on someone who doesn’t fancy older men (or let’s just say “the old”). I taught for decades but never slept with a student (one ex-student on graduation day). I let the other person make the first move.
He was a fascinating dinner companion. He had an unusual self-assurance and smiled knowingly as if he already understood what you were saying. It was the early days of the internet and he told one story after another—stories he’d researched for Plugged In or some such trendy magazine. The story that struck me most was of an American who met an Englishwoman online. Through constant rambling and intimate conversations, they found they were perfectly suited to each other, fell in love, and decided to marry. He flew to London—and discovered she was sixty and he thirty. The age difference, which they’d never established during their hundreds of hours online, seemed insignificant next to all their shared values and expectations. They married and lived together happily back in his native Akron, Ohio, to the astonishment of their friends and relatives, and both worked in the diner he owned. My date, Denver (not his real name), presented the internet as something spiritual, linking souls on the deepest level; of course we all know the cesspool of lying, vitriol, and unscrupulous subterfuge it eventually became, but in those pioneer years it promised to be a new, exciting utopia.
As if this scarcely believable story had been a preview of his own obliviousness of the barriers posed by age, he began to kiss me immediately after dinner. I’m lucky enough to have a functioning fireplace in Manhattan. I lit the logs I’d previously laid and soon we were naked on the floor beside the blaze. The thick red hair on his head and the sleeves of glinting red gold on his arms and the shield of pliant red on his chest and stomach, not to mention his burning bush, seemed too good to be true. We had memorable sex but afterward he complained I was somehow too experienced, too slutty, too quick and adept in assuming the position. He didn’t like how I’d expertly swiveled my ass up to his waiting cock. What he wanted was a timid, gray, recently divorced elderly man who would reluctantly give way to his ardor—someone wooden and naive, astonished by his own acquiescence, endowed with the purity of the until-recently-heterosexual, the clumsy paterfamilias who’d shamefully nursed forbidden fantasies of a fiery young redhead, someone who would finally surrender to the redhead’s passion but mutter later that that battering had really hurt, darn it. I felt I was being punished for not being a nerd.
I lost touch with him but discovered he was teaching in upstate New York and had become a sought-after screenwriter. From a movie magazine I learned where he was teaching. He’d also found a gray, tubby lover of a certain age. Denver brought the lover to a pizza party at my place. All the handsome, wasp-waisted, bumblebee-torso “boys,” forty years old and well launched in their careers as writers, filmmakers, and designers, clever and expensively coiffed and shod, though the clothes in between head and feet were “young,” generic, and off-the-rack—they were all buzzing around Denver with his red hair, low, resonant voice, growing fame, unimpeachable masculinity. They could scarcely believe they weren’t his type and that the balding guy alone in the corner was his chosen lover.
I found out that Denver’s father was a chauffeur for a car service and had ferried Joyce Carol Oates and me to New York more than once. There we were, brightly chattering and oblivious in the back seat while Denver’s father under his black hat with its badge and shiny bill drove us into the gathering February dusk. Little did we know this ideal young man had sprung from these quite ordinary loins.
***
There was the guy I met online who said he was a Scottish top. I asked him if he could wear a kilt while I bottomed for him. He lived in a worker’s cottage in Brooklyn, only one room on each floor. It was a square brick building with an Arts and Crafts wooden door—a multipaneled oak door with clear glass side lights. There was a fire in the fireplace, which had dusty blue tiles all around it.
The Scot was tall and slender and decked out in full regalia—a kilt, a short black jacket with silver buttons, high socks, a sort of pouch or purse on a chain around his waist, the sporran. I knew that under the plaid kilt there was a dick and hairy balls, no underpants. He was younger than forty and had a wide mouth full of white teeth, blue eyes as blue and large as a songbird’s eggs if they’d been made of crystal, a sharp nose, and an accent that was almost intelligible, though less and less so as I became more and more stoned on the joints he was feeding me. He seemed surprised and slightly vexed that I hadn’t brought any weed, as if I were just another freeloader bottom who expected to be kept high and well fucked. Which I was. Or so it seemed. He didn’t say much. I was worried that I’d made a faux pas. He ordered me to take off my clothes and kneel. I obeyed.
I could see his erection ticking up and dimpling his kilt. I always became hypnotized by cock when I was stoned; my nipples ached in anticipation of their being worked. I was so insecure about my body that my very shame felt erotic—vulnerable, despicable if despising was on the program, worthy of being punished, eager to be punished. His mouth, now that it was closed in an unsmiling line, was exactly as long and straight as each eyebrow, a Morse code of male beauty or maybe like the oblong pitches in a medieval hymnal.
He snapped his fingers and pointed to the tips of his black slippers, not bedroom slippers but the kind you traditionally wear with a kilt. I crawled over there, as big and awkward as Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street, a Muppet so large and unwieldy that it takes two people to operate him. The Scot, Robert was his name, sat on a high stool next to the fireplace and folded back the panels of his kilt to reveal his big erection, as Christ tears open his chest to display his red, red Sacred Heart. I began to slide my pot-dry mouth up and down on the veined shaft. He kept up a muttered narrative in his incomprehensible accent; he might as well have been speaking Plattdeutsch. Before long he had me in the room upstairs, his bedroom with its gigantic bed covered with a taut rubber sheet.
His older lover showed up and began to order me around in an accent I couldn’t place. He tried to fist me and I said I wasn’t quite ready for that. The idea excited me, but I’d never tried it. He said, “If I split you open, so what? Why do we all have this expensive health insurance if we never use it?” His accent sounded Slavic, which made it all the more sinister. I never did figure out his nationality. I thought his remark about health insurance sounded disagreeably fatalistic and bleak.
We had many rematches, the three of us. Once, I was ordered to bring a young fourth for the Slavic lover (he wasn’t really into old men). The guy I brought along was a handsome Mormon hustler/actor/poet/waiter; Robert and his lover suspected he was hired flesh and seemed to be against that in principle. I kept assuring them he was a friend, which he was, though in truth I did pay him—but they were dubious. The Slav sucked him and Robert fucked him, though normally he liked to dominate the elderly and the overweight. I couldn’t believe he didn’t prefer this healthy, happy, brawny blond with the beautiful skin and glittering smile, his slim waist and big chest, his low voice and the movements of an athlete, graceful but not intentionally graceful.
Another evening Robert wore tight-fitting leathers and he and the Slav shaved my body. On yet another evening we all went to a restaurant in the neighborhood and Robert waited in the men’s room for me to come in there and get fucked in a public place, but I was too stoned to understand what I was supposed to do. On another cold evening, he greeted me at the door to his house in a jockstrap and began to flog me. I bellowed my pain but both he and the Slav shushed me; they were afraid a neighbor passing by might hear my cries. They didn’t want theirs to be known as the House of Pain. Then we all moved to the bathroom upstairs. The Slav and I crouched in the tub, whereas Robert stood up on the sink and aimed his piss at one of us or the other. We both competed for it like seals begging for fish. I make it sound comical but it was as serious as a christening.
Then Robert broke up with the Slav, who’d become a serious drunk and fell down the stairs repeatedly. They sold their little house and the Slav moved back to Poland. Soon he was dead, I heard, from drink; maybe the breakup (or his retirement from his fascinating job) had destroyed him—or maybe he died just from the habitual progress of alcoholism (my AA friends and family members have taught me not to search for psychological reasons for alcoholism but to recognize it not as a symptom but as the disease itself).
Robert became a loving nonsexual friend, though I relished stories about his own exploits. He and his new lover went to a fisting colony in Normandy (it no longer exists), and there Robert pushed an entire football up a Frenchman’s rear; the man had to visit a local surgeon. Curiously, a whole queue of ass-hungry men were lined up before Robert’s door at the colony the next day. They, too, wanted to be worthy of a serious operation. In Berlin when Robert ran into the man who’d needed surgery, that guy was ready for a rematch—greedy glutes!
Robert is always courtly now—to the point of actually reading my countless books! In his huge penthouse apartment that looks out in all four directions at Manhattan, he has parties peopled with handsome young professionals and even a few women. Cute caterers are circulating with champagne and caviar. He couldn’t be kinder or more respectful. He praises my prose to his nonreading rich gay friends. I remember the first opera I saw as a child in New York. It was The Magic Flute at the Old Met. The hero had to pass through the frighteningly believable trials of fire and water to enter his father’s temple; that seemed like what I’d gone through to bask in Robert’s esteem (though secretly I was nostalgic for the trials).
***
Women? you ask. In the horrid old days we used to call them fag hags. The women who frequented gay men liked that they were around. The men tended to be good-looking, fun, muscular, always laughing, and good dancers. They went out almost every night, unlike their straight counterparts, who played only on weekends. Gay men could be flirtatious and (if you got them drunk and they were young) would even fuck you. Older ones or sober ones seemed more committed to their “lifestyle.” Gay guys would sleep with you and snuggle, pretend to be your boyfriend on an evening out with the boss or the visiting relatives from Amarillo. Gay guys would hold the door open for you and not expect you to split the bill. Occasionally you might meet an actual straight man with them when their little brother or college roommate was visiting. Or the straight black stud who was gay-friendly might end the evening with one of their girls. If you put on a few pounds or wore a dress twice, gay men would scarcely notice. All they required was that you be “fun.” Lonely beautiful women who were staying true to a fiancé in another city were attractive eye candy. In the old days before AIDS and before gays were so identifiable, a beautiful gal pal might lure a drunk heterosexual man into a three-way, especially desirable in the distant past when gays were attracted only to straights (“Why would I go to bed with another pansy? And do what? Rub pussies?”).
In those bad old days (the fifties), gay men were allergic to women, but in the seventies, after Stonewall, gay men started hanging out with women, just as after the feminist revolution women began to socialize with one another. I can remember in the forties when my mother thought it was an admission of defeat (or perversion) to be seen in public alone with another woman. Now gay men search out their female counterparts; an Australian friend is hosting a woman from Berlin, who, he says, “is a real slut—just like me!” My husband has a rich young lady friend who is a lesbian but currently with a man. My late best friend Marilyn used to say she preferred sex with men but that she could fall in love only with a woman.
Adapted from The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, to be published by Bloomsbury in January.
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, A Saint from Texas, and The Humble Lover. His nonfiction books include City Boy, Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and The Flâneur. He has received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
