The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White | First Edition

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall vern on the night of the first gay uprising--and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink-- The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

"With intelligence, candor, humor--and anger--White explores the most insidious aspects of oppression.... An impressive novel.