(E)Racing Edmund White: Queer Reading, Race, and Sexuality in A Boy’s Own Story

A history of racialized sexuality in the US suggests that sexuality is saturated by race even in American literature written by white gay men. Reading Edmund White’s coming out novel, A Boy’s Own Story, in relation to a little-known work of gay pulp fiction, André Tellier’s Twilight Men, the essay provides a fictional example of the ways white gay identities might be seen simultaneously to collude with and undermine the history of whiteness. The essay also elaborates a strategy for queer reading of the incoherencies of sexual identities within multiple historical discourses.