THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY
I am now about ready to retire for the night
but I decide to pick up my pencil to jot down the lingering thoughts running
in my mind - because I don't wanna forget - The Beautiful Room
Is Empty by Edmund White.
This novel by White, written with brutal frankness,
honesty and bravery kept me turning its pages because they were so reflective
of my life, of every gay's life for that matter, that every now and then,
as I read it, I'd take a deep sigh and whisper, I know what you mean,
Edmund.
Here is a gay novel that narrates
how to grow up gay in America in the fifties, utterly strange to me but
real, a distinct voice so deviant from the chorus of Marlon Brando
and Paul Newman and Doris Day and John Wayne that I thought made up America
in those days. Those of us who were born in the sixties and went
to Philippine public schools could probably recall the US AID - handed
American books that were the staple of our learning, which bore illustrations
of a Hudson-looking father reading his newspaper, a baseball- uniform -attired-Rooney-looking
son holding fork and knife, a Judy Garland-looking daughter pouting
-- all three sitting around the dining table -- waiting for the Doris Day-looking
mother who is about to serve dinner.
That image in my Filipino mind was shattered
ever since I came to America where it was revealed to me how the real families
of America live. That's somehow frustrating... making me wish I'd never
been in this country at all. It is so much like London...I spoke recently
with a British woman and told her how I perceive London, how I'd like to
see Britons take a respite at three in the afternoon to prepare tea
and eat biscuits...I told her my dream of sitting on green pastoral places
where I could watch Britons spread their mantles on the grass for
picnics - she burst out laughing, Are you mad? she said, Do you
think Britain still lingers in the twenties? London no longer contains
the people you dream it contains... her message saddened me, prodding
me to revise so much of my romantic notions about places that have long
changed.
I was surrounded by John Wayne movies in growing
up, and I fell in love with him since the day I watched him embrace the
Asian boy in The Green Beret. I cried many nights when in its ending, John
Wayne died and the boy searched all over the place looking for him. How
I prayed for John Wayne to come back. And re-played that ending in so many
ways - John Wayne was still alive, he just got lost in the
jungles, he'd just captured temporarily - and in no time, he'd come
back to resume his friendship with the Asian boy...you know...
I guess I got stuck with John Wayne.
In coming to America, I thought every American male was John Wayne.
I lamented the fact there were no visible gays in America.
Until I came to this country. Until
I discovered that The Beautiful Room Is Empty.
In this book White describes the missing
character of America which many foreigners like me never saw before, he
is the gay American who lives so American-next-door-like yet deep inside
is full of fears, denial, futile search, sadness and self-rejection.
Edmund White, the blond-haired boy
who desperately tries to camouflage his homosexuality through art
and whose family spends money for his shrink to escape his malady is the
narrator of this triumphant gay novel.
Every gay who is born to a rejecting
society knows Edmund's story doesn't lie, every gay went through what it
tells: the woman he befriends, Maria, turns out to be a lesbian. His family
- his weird and self-centered mother; his father who instills
in his young mind his state of abnormality; his sister who has a tendency
to lesbianism herself - offers no consolation. His friends - the bookstore
owner who spends lavishly on a straight cop until he himself was engulfed
in poverty and the solitary painters - cannot be good role models
for him. And his first rejection in sex sounds all too familiar.
When freedom is given to Edmund, he
immediately gets magnetized to toilets and dark corners of the city, in
secluded rooms - for anonymous sex that are quick, impersonal, guilt-ridden,
self-destructing- all the more fanning his internal conflict - his conflict
of getting rid of homosexuality and lusting after men at the same time.That,
again, sounds too familiar.
Then Edmund gets into college and joins
straight guy fraternities because it is the correct thing to do - only
to struggle in their midst, and resort to the only survival instinct gays
have - to be one of them. In copying straight mannerisms, talks,
body moves, even fantasies, he deprives himself of truth. A man who denies
his true self can never be happy. He is the classic closet queen
who, even after he made love exclusively with men still thinks he'd become
straight one way or another. Edmund took hold of this false hope for a
long long time that he lost so much in life -
It's called the wasted youth.
Only when he unmasks does he secure
for himself a place in the world. In accepting the truth, he outwits and
outlives even the shrink who promised him normalcy. In the last parts of
the book, Edmund the blond-haired boy becomes Edmund White, one of the
greatest contemporary novelists of our time.
From hereon, he will embark into an
exciting gay world, the germinating world which the present gays now enjoy.
He will introduce us to the colorful
and sometimes tragic characters of A Boy's Own Story and Farewell Symphony.
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