Gay icon Edmund White still swinging

 Edmund White is one of the few literary giants of the gay world. He is best known for his tetralogy of autobiographical novels -- including "A Boy's Own Story," "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" and "The Farewell Symphony" -- and "States of Desire," a travelogue of pre-AIDS gay America. If his latest memoir, "City Boy," is anything to go by, he's also a very hard person to impress.

In "City Boy," White recounts his time in New York during the '60s and '70s, before and after the Stonewall riots. Back when New York was still a dangerous and dirty town, White arrived from the Midwest and managed to work his way into the inner circle of the city's cultural heavy hitters through a combination of talent, charm and sexual magnetism. Along the way he also co-authored a sex book ("The Joy of Gay Sex"), had flings with writer Bruce Chatwin and poet John Ashbery, and took jaunts to Rome and Venice. The book is as notable for its depictions of pre-AIDS gay life -- with its unabashed hedonism and seedy sex clubs -- as  for its insidery take on the New York literary world.

White spends much of the book describing his literary compatriots in unflattering terms, and few of his acquaintances from the period emerge unscathed. But White reserves his most acidic prose for those gay critics and artists who remained in the closet (the most vicious attack is aimed at Susan Sontag). Recently, White has himself been the subject of an attack by Gore Vidal, who savaged him in an interview with the Times of London. Talking about White's play "Terre Haute," which recounts a fictional encounter between Vidal and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Vidal called White "a filthy low writer" and dismissed his play as a "vulgar fag-ism."