Latest news with #ABoy'sOwnStory
3 days ago
- Entertainment
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
NEW YORK -- Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. "I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. 'Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life," he said. "Ed invented so many of us." White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: "How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story." He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated," he said. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex." He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. "He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'
Winnipeg Free Press
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. 'I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. 'Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life,' he said. 'Ed invented so many of us.' White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: 'How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story.' He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated,' he said. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex.' He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. 'He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Remembering Edmund White: When he proved himself wrong
In his 2005 autobiographical book, My Lives, Edmund White recalls being shamed as an adolescent by a psychologist and family friend, writing, 'Foolishly, I had imagined I could transform the dross of homosexuality into the gold of art, but now I saw I could never be a great artist.' Starting in 1973 with Forgetting Elena, to his relief and that of a world in which he is today known as the 'the pioneer of gay literature in America', he repeatedly proved himself wrong. White, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85, belonged to a generation of 'gay writers' who were not writing for a straight readership. He came to prominence at a time when homosexuality was illegal and publishing houses would routinely get sued for pornography over a 'kiss between two men'. White's visceral writing style and autobiographical works forced readers to get up close and personal with the grief of being 'different' in a cold and cruel world. White's father was ashamed of his son's sexuality, and his mother, a psychologist, saw him, as a 'guinea pig'. From trying to 'cure himself' to becoming one of the leading voices responsible for the explosion of queer writing in the mainstream was a long journey. White's The Edmund Trilogy — a coming-of-age tale of a gay man's life from childhood to middle age — tells this story. The first in the series, A Boy's Own Story, became an instant classic. At a time when queer writers often had to work in isolation, White, along with six of his contemporaries, formed The Violet Quill — a club with 'a mixture of gay male friends, lovers and enemies' — to build a network for writers like himself. Four of the seven founders died in the AIDS epidemic. Through all this grief and love, White wrote 30 books, each bold in its own way, leaving a legacy of freedom.
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Light touch always present in a story that is about love, pure and simple
Seán Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven is a queer coming-of-age novel set in a northern English village in 2002. Hewitt conveys the emotional intensity of late childhood and adolescence so well. The teeming excitement at your sexuality ascertaining itself, the uncertainty of launching yourself forward as an individual, of wondering what the shape of you might be. We first encounter James returning to the village where he grew up, considering buying an old farmhouse. As he looks around, he is brought back to a formative summer. Surely, we all have one. 'Time runs faster backwards. The years-long, arduous, and uncertain when taken by one, unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow-encrusted garden.' This novel reminds me of Edmund White's iconic A Boy's Own Story in that both protagonists look back and explore the loneliness of queer adolescence, the feeling of being outside the swim. Yet, most of us can identify with that early grappling for identity. The wanting to be wanted. 'I could smell the heat off him, could almost taste him in my mouth. I was trapped there, part resentment, part pure pleasure, so close to him, so close to his power, that for a split second I thought perhaps he wanted me to kiss him.' Open, Heaven is a more innocent book than White's A Boy's Own Story. Sixteen-year-old James is a gentle, shy boy who loves his family, yet he often feels smothered by them. Hewitt draws the son's attempt to break away from the mother figure particularly well, his stiffening in public when she embraces him. In White's novel he viscerally charts the self-loathing of the queer boy who in the 1950s wanted to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be 'homosexual'. James in Open, Heaven does not share that fear, and there is a limited measure of societal progress. James comes out to a family who are gently supportive, although the attitude of his schoolmates remains challenging. While the self-loathing is happily absent, there is still that sense of being cut loose and alone. He is effectively ostracised because of the outside world's persistent homophobia. James must navigate his queerness in a predominantly straight world. Into his life comes gorgeous Luke, who becomes the lightning rod for his desires. Luke's sexuality remains ambiguous. James brings him a page from a porn magazine hoping that Luke might think of him as a girl. Luke is a troubled magnetic boy with an absent mother and a father in prison. Adults perceive him as a troublemaker. And so, we see two outsiders draw close. The backdrop to the book is, if not economic deprivation, quiet rural poverty and the struggle to make a living. It occurs to James that his family may not be able to afford to turn on the heating, and he faces a two-hour walk to school. The novel is not laden down by plot. I personally enjoyed the focus on the interiority of the protagonist's life. A profoundly moving bond forms between the boys. The ending had me almost reaching for a tissue because it is about love, plain and simple. This is never a dark book because the light touch is always there, and it is the better for it. How exhausting it must be for queer adolescents to so often see themselves depicted on the page as only tortured and struggling. Hewitt's debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, was published in 2020 to much fanfare. Since then, he has produced a book a year. He is also an assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin and a darling of the critics. Born in England to an Irish mother and an English father, his sensibility feels midway between both cultures. Open, Heaven is written with lyrical delicacy, featuring beautiful Hardyesque descriptions of nature with an intimate tone. Hewitt is a poet at heart, and it leaps from the page. 'And then across the village, there came the high metallic notes of the church bells pealing, as if the sound, as if time itself, were being pulled upwards, brightly, into the sky.' I couldn't recommend it more.
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Edmund White – the ‘godfather of gay literature'– is no more: 6 books you should read
Edmund White, the author who redefined queer literature, passed away on June 3, 2025, at the age of 85. A prolific writer, White penned over 30 books, including autobiographical novels and biographies, that captured the complexities of gay life with wit, sensuality, and emotional depth. His work chronicled everything from the liberating hedonism of pre-AIDS New York to the devastating losses of the epidemic, cementing his legacy as one of the most important gay writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. White wrote fearlessly, blending high literary style with raw, often explicit accounts of desire and identity. Below is a guide to some of his most essential books. 1. A Boy's Own Story (1982) A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel that became a cornerstone of gay literature. Set in 1950s America, A Boy's Own Story follows an unnamed teenager grappling with his homosexuality in a repressive, homophobic society. White's protagonist is introspective and conflicted, simultaneously drawn to and ashamed of his desires. The novel captures the loneliness of adolescence as the boy navigates fraught relationships with his distant father, troubled mother, and a series of older men who both fascinate and confuse him. What makes this novel canonical is its refusal to sanitise the queer experience. The protagonist is neither a victim nor a hero but a complex, sometimes selfish young man trying to understand himself. White turns personal memory into something universally resonant. A Boy's Own Story remains one of the most influential coming-out novels ever written. 2. The Farewell Symphony (1997) An elegiac novel about gay life before and during the AIDS crisis. Named after Haydn's symphony (in which musicians leave the stage one by one until only silence remains), The Farewell Symphony is the final installment in White's autobiographical trilogy. It follows an unnamed narrator—a stand-in for White—through the sexual liberation of the 1970s and the devastation of AIDS in the 1980s and '90s. The novel is both a celebration and a eulogy, capturing the hedonistic freedom of pre-AIDS New York and Fire Island, where sex and art intertwined effortlessly. But as friends and lovers begin to die, the tone shifts to one of mourning and survivor's guilt. White's ability to balance humor, eroticism, and grief makes this one of his most powerful works—a definitive account of a generation lost. 3. My Lives (2005) A memoir structured thematically rather than chronologically, offering intimate glimpses into White's psyche. Instead of a linear life story, My Lives is divided into chapters such as 'My Shrinks,' 'My Hustlers,' and 'My Blonds,' each exploring a different facet of White's identity. The result is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait that is funny, self-deprecating, and unflinchingly honest. Highlights include his hilarious yet painful recollections of therapy (where psychiatrists tried to 'cure' his homosexuality), his complicated relationship with his abusive father, and his candid accounts of sexual escapades. What makes My Lives so compelling is White's refusal to conform to conventional memoir tropes. 4. Genet: A Biography (1993) A masterful biography of the infamous French writer and criminal-turned-literary-icon. White spent seven years researching Jean Genet, the gay outlaw whose novels (Our Lady of the Flowers, The Thief's Journal) glorified theft, betrayal, and queer desire. The biography is both a meticulous study of Genet's life and a meditation on the intersections of art, transgression, and politics. White's deep empathy for his subject shines through, particularly in passages about Genet's impoverished childhood and later activism for the Black Panthers and Palestinians. The book won critical acclaim and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, solidifying White's reputation as a formidable biographer. 5. The Joy of Gay Sex (1977, co-authored with Charles Silverstein) A sex manual that celebrated gay desire without shame. Written before the AIDS crisis, The Joy of Gay Sex was an affirming guide that treated homosexuality not as a pathology but as a source of pleasure and connection. Covering everything from cruising to BDSM, it combined practical advice with White's elegant prose, making it both useful and literary. Though some sections are dated (particularly in light of HIV), the book remains a fascinating artifact of a freer era. It was one of the first mainstream books to discuss gay sexuality openly, paving the way for future queer writers. 6. The Married Man (2000) A heartbreaking novel about love, mortality, and the lingering scars of AIDS. Loosely based on White's relationship with his partner Hubert Sorin (who died of AIDS in 1994), The Married Man follows Austin, an American writer in Paris, as he falls for Julien, a married French architect. Their romance is sadly shadowed by Julien's declining health. White's novel, unlike most AIDS narratives, is unsentimental yet deeply moving. He captures the small, everyday intimacies of love alongside the bureaucratic horrors of illness such as hospital visits, insurance battles, the slow erosion of a body. It is one of his most emotionally resonant works.
