A Boy’s Own Story was published by E.P. Dutton in 1982. The novel draws on White’s own childhood and adolescence in Cincinnati and Michigan during the 1950s, following an unnamed narrator from early childhood through his teenage years as he discovers and attempts to manage his homosexuality in an era when it was considered both criminal and pathological.
The narrator’s world is affluent, Midwestern, culturally aspirational, and emotionally frigid. His parents are divorced; his father is distant and money-obsessed; his mother is needy and performatively cultured. The boy navigates this environment while concealing a desire that he understands, from the earliest age, to be shameful and dangerous. He is sent to a psychiatrist to be “cured.” He attends boarding school where homosexuality exists in a coded subculture of furtive encounters and elaborate denials.
White’s achievement is tonal: the novel is neither a coming-out narrative of triumphant self-acceptance nor a victim narrative of persecution. The narrator is not heroic — he is often cruel, manipulative, self-deceiving, and complicit in his own oppression. The prose is precise and analytical, dissecting emotional states with a clinical detachment that is itself a survival strategy: if you can describe your suffering with sufficient elegance, you can hold it at arm’s length.
The novel was published at a crucial moment — between the Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis — and spoke to a generation of gay men who recognized their own experiences in its pages. It remains one of the essential texts of American queer literature, distinguished from later coming-out narratives by its refusal of easy resolution or political uplift.
Collecting A Boy’s Own Story
First edition (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1982): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100
- Signed: $150–$400