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 Book‘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.

Peter Cameron is the author of several novels, including The City of Your Final Destination, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, and, most recently, Coral Glynn. He lives in New York City, and publishes limited-edition books at Shrinking Violet Press.

Benjamin Taylor is the author of two novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. His most recent book is a travel memoir, Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012 and next year will publish Proust: The Future’s Secret, a biography for Yale’s Jewish Lives series. He lives in New York City.