Edmund White obituary

The Guardian

04-06-2025

Edmund White was present in June 1969 when the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar in Manhattan, New York. Shouts of 'gay power' were heard as bartenders, hat-check boys and the owners were hauled off in vans. At first it seemed an unexpected laugh, and then the men milling round in the street started to resist the police and their billy clubs. It was the moment when gay militancy was born.
White, who has died aged 85, went on to become one of the most prominent gay writers of his generation, but by temperament he was not a blazing militant. His sensibility was that of a midwestern Marcel Proust, and he did not do anger. An evening spent cruising the gay bars, or chatting about the New York literary scene with the gay writers who formed the Violet Quill group, was more his style.
He wrote confidently about the experience of gay men, and in 1977 he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, a unique pre-Aids guide to sexual practices and etiquette. It appeared at a time when such information was exceptionally hard to find in straight America, and made him, overnight, an inspiration and a scandalous celebrity.
He was hardly the first writer confidently to proclaim his sexual identity, but sexual acts between men were then punishable by prison in the US, and 'fag-baiting' had widespread currency. Many gay writers and artists, some of them White's close friends, preferred to remain closeted. The writer Susan Sontag had cautioned White against the inevitable professional suicide of coming out.
White's first international bestseller, which did particularly well in Britain, was A Boy's Own Story (1982), an autobiographical novel of a young boy's coming out that traced his own experience with frankness and considerable erotic detail. A year after it was published, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a strong reference from Sontag, who knew the French capital well, White moved to Paris with his then lover James Purcell. He did not return to New York until 1998. Among the attractions of life in Paris was that he did not have to be a professional 'gay novelist', though his social world was dominated by his gay friends there.
In 1985, White published Caracole, a novel that contained thinly veiled portraits, not always sympathetic, of Sontag and the poet and translator Richard Howard. It caused a permanent break with Sontag, and was perceived in New York as an ill-tempered settling of scores with former friends. Sontag demanded the removal of her friendly blurb from future editions of A Boy's Own Story.
Three years later White published The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel to A Boy's Own Story, about the emotional and erotic entanglements he had known. There seemed to be little other than his romantic and sexual needs to write about, but his detachment from American life was clear: 'I felt a real nausea whenever I faced America's frumpy cuteness.' The Farewell Symphony (1997) completed a trilogy of autobiographical fictions telling the life story of a gay man from childhood to middle age.
As a young boy growing up in Cincinnati, and then at Cranbrook academy, a private school near Detroit, White felt intense shame at his sexuality, and spent fruitless years in psychoanalysis looking for a cure. 'I felt intensely lonely as a teenager keeping the terrible secret of my homosexuality,' he wrote in his 2005 autobiography My Lives, which retraced many of the relationships that had appeared somewhat disguised in his earlier books.
His father, Edmund White II, a wealthy civil engineer and entrepreneur, was ashamed and outraged at a homosexual son, and one who did not play baseball.
In The Beautiful Room Is Empty, he remembered advice from his father: 'I'm not saying you should marry for money. Just make sure the girls you go out with are all rich.' White felt unfathomably 'different' in a world that was aggressively homophobic and threatening to a young man with a yearning for sex, love and affection with men. He wrote of himself in My Lives as 'an overly brainy, nervous kid with knobby elbows and knees, pale blue veins ticking beneath the pale white skin, a long, almost constricted torso'.
His mother, Delilah (known in the family as Lila Mae), a Baptist from Texas who converted to Christian Science, was more sensitive but also more emotionally needy; she wanted Eddie nearby. He felt that his mother loved him, without really understanding him. Family life was suffocating.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese ('I knew I was a complete fraud,' he later admitted, 'that I couldn't read or write or speak or understand Chinese'), he headed to New York, taking with him the guilt, anxiety and conflicted memories of a deeply unhappy childhood.
New York had an established gay bohemian scene, and he relished the city's erotic possibilities. No one used condoms. White got the clap on average once a month and dated his clap doctor. The city then had no gay bookstores, few gay bars, no magazines, agents or publishers interested in gay writing, and so far as he knew there were no readers in the US for gay books. He wrote several novels, which were discouragingly rejected, and, to pay the rent, worked for eight years at Time-Life Books. White read in a cover story in Time magazine in 1966 that homosexuality was a 'pernicious sickness'. Several of his psychoanalysts shared that attitude.
He met Howard in 1967 and bemoaned his failure to make any headway with his literary career. Howard read the manuscript of his novel Forgetting Elena (set on an imaginary island domain modelled on the gay resort of Fire Island), made some helpful stylistic suggestions, and managed to interest an editor at Random House in the book. Published in 1973, it received lukewarm praise in the New York Times and sold 600 copies.
The British book-packager Mitchell Beazley, who had a phenomenal success with Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (8m copies sold worldwide after publication in 1972), commissioned White to do The Joy of Gay Sex. It was frank, unjudgmental and filled with unexpected detail. It did not make him rich, but that kind of visible success opened doors in New York.
White was then commissioned by Beazley to write a travelogue of gay America, which appeared as States of Desire in 1980. He was ambivalent about what he had seen of the gay scene across the nation. There was still too much self-hatred in gay life, and he did not particularly like the emerging style of extreme butch masculinisation.
Gay men in New York were galvanised into a collective response to the unfolding crisis of Aids in the early 1980s. White attended the meeting at Larry Kramer's apartment in Manhattan on 9 January 1982, when the Gay Men's Health Crisis was formed. Within 16 months GMHC had become the largest Aids service organisation in the world.
But White soon detached himself from the intense political struggles on the board and in the ensuing decade maintained a near-total silence about Aids. Many of his friends and lovers died of the disease. His lack of response seemed a manifest failure of his nerve as a writer.
In Paris, White seemed comfortable with the expansive role of cultural guide to the city and French writing. His solidly researched biography of Genet, published in 1993 after seven years' research, was greeted with the most unequivocally positive reviews of his career. Appointed Chevalier (later Officier) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1993, he received the National Book Critics's Circle award for his Genet, and the David Kessler award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at City University of New York.
This was followed by Our Paris (1994), offering light-hearted sketches of Parisian haunts. An accessible and chatty biographical study of Proust appeared in 1999, followed two years later by The Flaneur, in which he took an agreeable stroll through fondly remembered Parisian scenes. His biography of the symbolist poet Rimbaud appeared in 2008.
He was also a classic cultural academician, having been made a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught creative writing at Princeton University and other universities and collected his literary essays and reviews in The Burning Library (1994) and Arts and Letters (2004).
His vivid memories of New York in the 60s and 70s, the pre-Aids New York of plentiful sex and romantic entanglements, appeared in City Boy (2009); and he chronicled the Paris years in Inside a Pearl (2014). He ranged across his life as a reader of thousands of books in The Unpunished Vice (2018) and as a lover in The Loves of My Life (2025). Two subsequent novels, Fanny, A Fiction (2003) and Hotel de Dream (2007), were amusing historical pastiches, and five more followed, most recently The Humble Lover (2023).
White is survived by Michael Carroll, his partner since the 90s, whom he married in 2013.
Edmund Valentine White, writer, born 13 January 1940; died 3 June 2025