A Boy's Own Story

A Boy's Own Story is a 1982 semi-autobiographical novel by Edmund White. Overview A Boy’s Own Story is the first of a trilogy of novels, describing a boy's coming of age and documenting a young man's experience of homosexuality in the 1950s in Cincinnati, Chicago and Michigan. The trilogy continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), which brought the setting up to the 1990s. Although all three share a number of themes and are frequently considered at least partly autobiographical, they do not tell a linear story in the manner of some trilogies, and can be read independently of one another. Plot The story starts when the narrator, aged 15, experiences the physical side of young love with his twelve-year-old friend Kevin O'Brien. Although he is the younger boy, Kevin takes the lead in the sexual activity. The encounters between the two adolescents become infrequent and are pushed to the background as the narrator's soul-searching about his homosexuality continues. The narrator remembers his childhood and his parents' divorce, as well as his older sister's constant teasing. Since a young age, he knew he was attracted to men, but he tried to outgrow it or rationalize it as some kind of passing phase. During a visit to his father over the summer, the protagonist befriends a man from the town that promises to take him to New York for some money. The man never appears on the day that they were going to leave, so the protagonist understands that he was tricked. The next time he meets him, however, the man takes him to a hustler, with whom the protagonist has his first sexual experience. During a camping trip to which he arrives earlier than the rest of the boys, he gives oral sex to a troubled boy that everyone else avoided.