The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White is a 1988 semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of a young gay man’s coming-of-age. It is the second installment in a trilogy, depicting the teenaged and early adult years of the protagonist. The novel follows the nameless narrator and his experiences as a homosexual during the 1950s and 60s, up until the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Throughout the novel, the protagonist struggles to build his career as a writer, while simultaneously attempting to suppress his homosexual desires.

The story begins with the narrator describing his life while attending an upper middle-class preparatory school which he describes as restrictive. The conventions imposed by his school seem to be extensions of those that exist within American society, which he already feels at odds with. The narrator expresses feeling like an outsider. He recalls the way his mid-Western parents sequestered him as he was growing up, and yearns to rebel against the entire system. In an effort to escape, he starts to hang around the art school across the street, befriending Maria, a boisterous and outspoken bisexual, with whom he develops a close and important friendship. Maria is his gateway to the world of counter-culture that he has been seeking, a place where people like him are the norm.

Maria introduces him to a plethora of people who do not comply with social norms; long-term homosexual couples, lesbians, and a bookshop owner named Tex, who provides the narrator with his first foray into the world of gay sex. After the narrator graduates from his preparatory school, he goes on to college. Here, he decides that he will rid himself of his homosexual tendencies once and for all. He begins to see an eccentric therapist who hopes to treat him, and ultimately cure him, of his homosexuality. At the same time, the narrator is having promiscuous sex with all kinds of people. Although he begins to realize that this kind of sex is empty and devoid of meaning, he feels unable to control his behavior, and so, continues to do it.



He maintains his friendship with Maria, although it is strained due to his inability to accept himself as a homosexual man. The narrator finds himself increasingly drawn towards people who have rejected the constraints placed on them by society and parental figures. He idolizes the way they embrace a kind of freedom that he hopes to attain himself.

After his first year of college, the narrator spends the summer in his mother’s apartment in Chicago while she is away in Europe. During his stay, he meets Lou, a successful advertising executive who also lives in his mother’s building. The two develop a romantic relationship, and through it, Lou challenges some of the narrator’s preconceived notions about masculinity, writing, and his identity as a homosexual. At first, the narrator instinctively wants to push Lou away, feeling uncomfortable about some of the ideas and feelings stirred up in him by their conversations. Over time, he begins to see that Lou only wants to help, and comes to accept the man’s guidance, while at the same time realizing Lou’s own human shortcomings.

At the end of the summer, the narrator’s mother returns to Chicago. She comes to know about her son’s behavior during her time abroad, and subsequently chastises him for his lack of self-restraint and not dedicating himself fully to his therapy sessions and his recovery. In this moment, the narrator agrees with his mother that he has not been following the advice of his therapist, and realizes that it is because he does not actually want to change himself as badly as he thought he did. Over the summer and the months spent with Lou, the narrator came to accept himself for who he truly is, and he no longer believes that the change his mother wants for him is even possible. However, Lou has decided to make an attempt at heterosexual marriage, devastating the narrator.



The narrator stops seeing his therapist almost immediately following this conversation with his mother. He meets a man named Sean and they begin seeing each other. He realizes that Sean has a lot of issues surrounding his own sexual orientation, and Sean eventually ends the relationship because of them. After this experience, the narrator starts to think that he might be better off giving heterosexual marriage a shot. However, he reconsiders when he hears that Lou’s attempt at doing just that has ended in failure.

One night, the narrator and Lou are at a gay bar that is raided by the police. The bar's patrons, unable to accept yet another expression of societal oppression, fight back. The narrator and Lou watch from the sidelines, witnessing what they believe to be a demonstration of freedom and rebellion that is long overdue.