Peter Cameron and Benjamin Taylor discuss Totempole

On Thursday, September 18, at 7 p.m., join Peter Cameron and Benjamin Taylor for a discussion of Totempole by Sanford Friedman. This event is taking place on the occasion of New York Review Books's re-publishing of Totempole, originally published in 1965. Totempole is a coming-of-age story that traces the life of a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City from two-year-old boy to twenty-four-year-old man. As Peter Cameron writes in the book’s afterword, "Totempole is an unusual gay novel: It isn't about life in the closet, and it isn't about coming out. It's about the space in between those two stages of gay life, a complex and murky area that has not often been written about: coming out to oneself." Born in New York City, Sanford Friedman (1928–2010) was a novelist, playwright, and theater producer who taught writing at Juilliard and SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders). He served as a military police officer in Korea from 1951 to 1953, where he earned a Bronze Star. He is the author of several novels, including Conversations with Beethoven, published for the first time and now available from NYRB Classics.