Groundbreaking gay author Edmund White dies at 85

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty, has died. He was 85.
White's death was confirmed on Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details.
Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence.
He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of Aids, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years.
A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist.
Author Edmund White at his home in New York in 2019 (Mary Altaffer/AP)
A Boy's Own Story was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal.
He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.
He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.
He was an encyclopaedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favourites as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Henry Green's Nothing.
'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995.
'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.'
In early 1982, just as the public was learning about Aids, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated Aids prevention and education.
The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who did not want him to touch their babies.
White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones die.
Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from Aids. As White wrote in his elegiac novel The Farewell Symphony, the story followed a shocking arc: 'Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.'
Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people
But in the 1990s he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives.
'We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that,' he said in a Salon interview in 2009.
'Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.'
In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honour previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others.
'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech.
White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at seven moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced.
His father was a civil engineer, his mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping'.
Trapped in 'the closed, snivelling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's Death In Venice or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay Out Of The Closet, On To The Bookshelf, published in 1991.
Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school.
Edmund White was one of the leading gay American authors (Mary Altaffer/AP)
After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review.
He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Socially, he met William S Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas.
He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel Caracole.
'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote.
Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would 'dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars'. A favourite stop was the Stonewall and he was in the neighbourhood on the night of June 28 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.'
'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.'
His works included Skinned Alive: Stories and the novel A Previous Life, in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death.
In 2009, he published City Boy, a memoir of New York in the 1960s and 1970s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels.
'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told The Guardian. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature – the holy book.
'There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'