The author does an excellent job portraying the bizarre ways in which all different types of people, particularly gay men and celebrities, live in this part of LA. With chapter titles like 'Anger,' 'Botulism,' and 'Murder,' the book is, by turns, fascinating and repulsive. The author saves himself by ranting about the indignities he has to deal with in everyday life (almost getting run over by SUVs, the weird behaviors and fashions of his fellow West Hollywood residents, aggravating publicists and others he deals with as a freelance writer, etc.), but also begrudgingly admitting that he is sometimes grossly unreasonable himself. The humor is caustic and both critical of others and self-critical. The preface makes clear that reading this shouldn't be life-changing or anything, but rather that the book is actually a collection of email letters the author sent to various family and friends after moving from small-town Texas to the huge mega-opolis of LA with his boyfriend/ husband, specifically West Hollywood. This book made me laugh a lot, but also question a number of times why I was reading it.

White lives in West Hollywood with his boyfriend, the Morocco Mole, and is locally esteemed as the “King of Pancakes.” His reviews and features have been seen in E! Online, IFILM, LA Weekly, Dallas Observer, Instinct, The Advocate, Glue, Cybersocket, Total Movie, Unzipped, and Frontiers. “They requested more fashion and skin-care features in its place, which makes me kind of proud.”ĭave White is a freelance journalist specializing in music.

What began as weekly diaries emailed to out-of-state family and friends evolved into a blog called “Dave White Knows” and in 2003 became a monthly column in Instinct called “Exile in Guyville.” Alyson Books now presents White’s blogs in expanded form with loads of new material that will be even more irritating to the Instinct readers who didn’t like his column. White gets gigs as a freelance writer, goes to the grocery store where his Russian neighbors ask him questions because they think he’s from the old country and encounters Sara Gilbert at the Laundromat, Leonard Maltin at the movies, and Ben Affleck driving a Rolls-Royce so ridiculously conspicuous he might as well be driving Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang. White explores his neighborhood ? “queens: 6 percent cranky 70-year-old Russians who give you the evil eye when you walk past: 2 percent blonde girls with big, round, hard fakeys who think Jennifer Anniston just got lucky: 10 percent miscellaneous cool kids, hustlers, and actual crazy people: 5 percent.” Here’s the diary of a man who in mid-life found himself uprooted and dumped into West Hollywood, an unfamiliar place not exactly known for stability.

Exile in Guyville by Dave White