Gay Paree In Words And Pictures

Our Paris: Sketches from Memory by Edmund White (Knopf)

One day I hope to visit Paris; it is a city that has always fascinated me. Part of my fascination has been sparked by accounts by and/or about famous American writers who once lived there: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, et al. Now it's Edmund White's turn to bedazzle me with the sights, sounds, and smells of that fabled city.

Our Paris: Sketches from Memory is a collaborative project he worked on with his now deceased (from AIDS) lover, Hubert Sorin, the French architect turned artist. It combines words and pictures.

White's descriptions of Parisian life, which includes anecdotes involving an array of characters (a few of whom are bizarre), are vivid and often funny. Like the one about the sixty-something prostitutes who "clobber stiffly down the stretch of cobbled street in their high heels." White surmises that "prostitution is just an innocent excuse for hanging out and chewing the fat with the girls."

Sorin's black-and-white storybook-like drawings superbly complement White's prose and are themselves evocative and humorous.

Throughout Our Paris, White is an unreluctant name dropper and gossipmonger. For example, he outs a grandson of the super macho Hemingway. The grandson, Ed, "wears the same clothes every day and rarely bathes," but is otherwise "a nice, normal homosexual."

Unfortunately, White is not unreluctant to let his class-consciousness and snobbery show. In one of his descriptions of the upscale Marais district, the neighborhood bordering his own, he refers to it as "a magnet for gay Parisians," who include "[w]olfpacks of guys in leather or jeans, their hair long and silky on top, shaved military style below all the way up to the temple." For White, these gay clones or "Kiki Boys" stir little, if any, interest "unless they're walking a dog--which already sets them apart as neighbors, not Bad Boys, as nice quiet bachelors." (White and Sorin had a basset hound named Fred.) Then they become "men with whom one can have a pleasant chat about the hardheaded (tetu) basset hound versus the crazy (fou-fou) terrier."

"I hope," writes White in the introduction, "at least a few readers will recognize its subtext is love." In 142 pages White succeeds in conveying not only his love for Sorin but also his love for Paris.

Overall, Our Paris will be a delightful reading experience for francophiles and non-francophiles alike.