A Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover
Edmund White’s “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” opens with the most remarkable account of cruising I know. By cruising I mean a specifically gay male practice of organized promiscuity, a form of sexual sociality at once universal—existing, in remarkably similar forms, in rural American truck stops and among Roman ruins—and, as White chronicles it, specific to a particular time and place, the Chelsea piers in nineteen-seventies New York, part of the extravagant, unprecedented gay world that flourished between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the onset of the aids crisis. In the nighttime scene that opens the book, men brush past each other in the dark, alert in their animal bodies, their senses sharpened by hunger; they send up cigarette flares, displaying themselves against the night sky; they pair off or remain solitary, unchosen—like the narrator, who lingers until sunrise, when finally he finds a man to go home with.