Monday, October 5, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt three)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

William Everett Hunton was one of the first handsome homosexuals I’d ever met, a small, neatly made little guy who would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students. Even though he was hoping to reform himself and was quite optimistic about a cure, at least for a while he had been gay, and could still be considered at least a transitional case. Annie and I would sit around his room in the law quad and listen to his adventures, presented as evidence of his depravity but with a suggestion that his scarlet sins, at least, had been mink-linked.

We were alone, he and I, for a moment. He was shaving and dressing and I watched him as a child might, as though I myself didn’t perform these same rites every morning (or in the case of shaving, every third morning). When I told him in which Midwestern city I’d been born, he laughed and said, “But that’s where my patron lives, the real Everett Hunton.”

“Come again?”



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