The dismissive, not very smart, title of the review gives you a lead ...

 This was in response to Daniel Mendelsohn's review ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ of Edmund White’s City Boy in the New York Review of Books September 30 – October 13, 2010 Volume LVII, Number 14. Journals rarely publish criticism of their editorial (tacit or not) policy  and practices.

The NYRB continues to publish articles which talk for example about ‘his homosexuality’; ‘his heterosexuality’ is a phrase never encountered.

Dear Editor

I read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Edmund White's  City Boy (NYRB Sept 30 - Oct 13) with little advantage of enlightenment.

It's not just that it stumbled around somewhat and was repetitive, it seemed oddly uninformed and glibly so where it was.

I gather Mendelsohn was around at the time, so what excuse can he have for not knowing The New York Time's scandalous history of homophobia? 

Why wouldn't White have 'a particular animus against it'?

This journal too has such a shadow across its history. Up until the death of its founding editors its pages rang with silence or antipathy towards gay concerns (sure it published Gore Vidal - on history and politics - and he had contributed to its founding).

The thing wrong with the Mendelsohn review is that it is oddly ungenerous and misleading.

Edmund White made huge advances in writing about human sexuality. Who amongst his contemporaries, gay or straight, explored the erotic as he has - Charles Bukowski?

Mendelsohn's admiration  turns instead to wondering where the early  'formalism' of the more or less unreadable Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples might have taken White. 

Talking of culs de sac, why is there no questioning of the role of homophobia in consigning 'gay writing' to the 'niche'? 

White defied that.

Mendelsohn writes as if it were never an issue.

He thus invokes what we were hoping was the buried tradition of this journal.

Ian MacNeill

Sydney