(4 of 4)
Sadly enough, White's was a kind of life that his father could never accept, or even imagine, for his only son. "The Joy of Gay Sex ((which White co- authored in 1977)) was promoted widely enough that I supposed some rumor of it might have reached even the Republican Valhalla of Cincinnati. My father had never mentioned the book to me. He had also stopped writing me. For that reason I was reluctant to face him. Thank God I did; he died a month later. At the funeral my stepmother told me he'd never known of the book. She had torn out the ads for it from the newspapers, and no one in his circle could have begun to form the syllables making up its title."
On a Friday night White is host at a small dinner party in his house with help from a friend, Stephanie Guss, who has prepared stuffed pheasant. At 8, the doorbell rings and Henry Abelove, a visiting associate professor of history from Wesleyan University, arriving with two others, says, "What a notorious neighborhood!" "I know," White replies, not missing a beat, greeting his guests, some of whom he is meeting for the first time, "and nobody believes me, but when I rented this house, I swear I didn't know. I didn't know."
Before sitting down, White observes to Henry Majewski, acting chairman of Brown's French department, that he's not sure how long he'll be at Brown. "Quite frankly, it all depends on whether they let my boyfriend in or not," he says, referring to a decision by the immigration service to bar his friend's entry from France because of a work-related visa problem. "He was sent back when he arrived, you know."
"Oh, how cruel," says Pierre Saint-Amand from Haiti, a professor in the French department.
"Yes," White says. "Since then, we've met a couple of times in Canada. If he gets in, we'll get a dog, travel. It could be nice."
Near midnight, the last guests leave, and Bob Praeger, a friend visiting from California, turns to White. "Ed, you were fabulous! Those stories you told, my God! I just can't believe there wasn't someone at the table with pencil and paper taking it all down." Bob is in Providence tracking down a letter for a book he is writing on General George Custer. One story leads to another; one letter leads to 300 others. It seems that Bob has all these letters, which he wants to sell, from a "male writer who," he explains, "has signed every one of them with a female name -- sometimes Judy Florida, sometimes Judy L.A."
; "Judy Florida," White laughs. "What a riot! He's an old friend, a writer who tells his old mother that he's a waiter. You know the one about the waiter who tells everyone he's really a writer -- well, this is just the reverse. His mother doesn't really know, and he's quite famous. He writes under the pen name of Andrew Holleran. Have you ever heard of Dancer from the Dance? He's the most famous gay writer in America."
"Ed," Bob interjects, angry. "He is not! You are!"
"I am," White says modestly, and then suddenly, for just the briefest moment, a look of fierce pride steals over his shining face.