The Stonewall riots in 1969 changed almost everything about gay life in New York City, and that famous event is now, in one respect, like Woodstock: far more people claim to have been there than actually were.

In all of the gonzo testimony about Stonewall, however, no reaction to the rioting has struck me as being so painfully honest (or so funny) as the novelist Edmund White’s. He was there at the Stonewall Inn when it erupted, he writes in his new memoir, “City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s.” And when all hell broke loose, his initial response was to sit and stew and cluck.

“I thought we shouldn’t create a fuss,” he admits. “This was bad for our image. I said out loud, ‘Oh, come on, guys.’ ”

That “Oh, come on, guys” moment is put into painful and complicated perspective in “City Boy.” Mr. White had arrived in Manhattan from the Midwest seven years earlier, in 1962, spurning a chance at a Harvard Ph.D. to follow a lover.