Ian Thomson

Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies

A review of Edmund White's Inside a Pearl. An X-rated memoir of the gay author's 15-year exile in Paris

Edmund White says that the first time he met Bruce Chatwin (pictured), they had sex immediately Photo: Getty 
issue 15 March 2014

In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking, sixty-nining, cruising, blowjobs, fisting, rimming and three-ways. Of course, Proust-inspired poetic exaltations to homosexual love have long characterised White’s fiction, from A Boy’s Own Story to Hotel de Dream. Yet White is no mere popinjay in thrall to high-flown campery; his mind is drawn to some very dark places.

Between 1983 and 1999, as an ardent Francophile, White elected to live in Paris. His chatty, salacious account of those years, Inside a Pearl, dilates knowledgeably on the gorgeousness of the ephebes to be found along the Seine; but the book is also a serious guide to the city’s gastronomy, literature and social customs. If White has nothing much to say on French wines (he is a teetotaller and reformed alcoholic), he does know his restaurants.

In 1956, at his boarding school near Detroit, White had read the firebrand French poet Arthur Rimbaud after lights out.

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