A few words about The Beautiful Room is Empty

Last month, I read Edmund White’s autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story, and I wrote about my impressions. I loved the novel, but it seemed to me that White didn’t take his unnamed protagonist very seriously, and he often wrote about him and his sexual awakening in a comical way. The boy in his novel was unusually frank and experienced considering the events described took place in the mid 1950s.

The Beautiful Room is Empty is White’s next autobiographical novel in a series of three. I’ve been reading it for the last week or so, and it is about the same unnamed young gay man. The story picks up where A Boy’s Own Story leaves off. The upper middle class boy is in his last year of prep school. He soon goes on to college, and after college, he moves to New York.

This novel is a bit darker than the first. The parents are no longer merely annoyed and perplexed by the boy’s homosexuality. They have become judgmental and alarmed. They believe he is sick, and so does the boy. His attempt to change via psychoanalysis intensifies, but he continues to experiment sexually and he desperately wants to find a community, a place where he belongs. He compartmentalizes everything. He behaves a certain way when he’s around his frat brothers, and he’s someone else when he’s with his bohemian artistic friends. He is studying Chinese, so he has yet another identity when he’s around his Chinese friends.

What none of these various groups know about the boy is that he frequents the college tea room, and sometimes he cruises the streets looking for anonymous encounters. Eventually, he becomes acquainted with other LGBTs, and he is often shocked by them even as he is drawn to them. Many of these people have obviously been warped by strong societal disapproval and fear of punishment. They think of themselves as sick criminals, just as the boy does.

A turning point is when the college tea room is raided and several of his fellow bathroom blowjob aficionados are arrested. Their names are printed in the paper for all to see, and they’re forced to accept years of probation and treatment in order to avoid prison. The boy was lucky enough to be out of town when the raid took place.

Another turning point is when the boy realizes that he must end his association with the psychoanalyst he began seeing when he was 15. He concludes that the therapy is pointless and that he isn’t going to change, but dropping out of therapy feels like he’s betraying his crazy doctor because the doctor was the only adult the boy could talk to about his attractions and urges. Surprisingly, the doctor has grown up a bit himself and agrees with the boy, who is by then in his early 20s, that it’s time to call it quits and accept reality.

The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White gives us a poignant and painfully honest glimpse back at what it was like to be young and queer in the late ’50s and early ’60s.