Gay Sex and the City

If the film "Gay Sex in the '70s" wasn't enough for you, perhaps Edmund White's new memoir, "City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and '70s," is more up your, uh, alley. White, who co-wrote "The Joy of Gay Sex," a book that certainly changed my life when I stumbled upon a used copy at Changing Hands Bookstore on Mill Avenue in Tempe, Ariz., in college, apparently knew of what he wrote:

Via Dwight Gardner's NYT review: Mr. White was there when the sexual pinata ripped open, and he collected his share of the goodies. In his previous memoir, “My Lives” (2006), he happily over-shared about things like his boundless appetite for male prostitutes, whom he ordered to his door like so many steaming boxes of pizza. In “City Boy” he remains a shock-and-awe exhibitionist.

Orgies; leather bars; tabs of LSD; sex on the balconies of gay dance halls, in the abandoned piers along the Hudson River and in the dunes on Fire Island; group sex with American Indians and Norwegian flight attendants from Minnesota -- it’s all here in exacting and eye-popping detail. He captures the “odor of brew, harness, sweat and Crisco” that began to fill gay men’s nostrils in the mid-’70s.

Mr. White was a kind of sexual werewolf. As midnight approached, he says, “my hands began to sprout hair, and my teeth to sharpen.” He sleeps with so many well-known writers and artists that this crackling if lightweight memoir can read less like a prelude to “And the Band Played On,” Randy Shilts’s stately book about the early days of AIDS, than an all-boy update of “I’m With the Band,” Pamela Des Barres‘s trippy and picaresque rock groupie memoir.

More details HERE.