Latest news with #OutoftheCloset
New Indian Express
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Edmund White, groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
Childhood yearnings White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer 'who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.' His mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping.' Trapped in 'the closed, sniveling, 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. As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' 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. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. 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 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.
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Edmund White, a groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
NEW YORK — 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 Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg. 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 New York's 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 recent backlash. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. '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, along with 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. '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.' White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' and a biography of 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 1991 essay 'Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.' As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' 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. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood 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.' White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive 'Forgetting Elena,' was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a follow-up to the bestselling 'The Joy of Sex' that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples,' was released and he followed with the nonfiction 'States of Desire,' his attempt to show 'the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.' His other 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 '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels 'Jack Holmes & His Friend' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told the Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. '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.' Italie writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edmund White, Author of 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Joy of Gay Sex', Dies at 85
Writer Edmund White has died at age 85 The author was widely regarded as a pioneering figure of LGBTQ+ literature, and published over 30 books throughout his career Some of White's most notable works included the semi-autobiographical novel A Boy's Own Story and the nonfiction book The Joy of Gay SexEdmund White, the pioneering author who documented the gay experience through acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, has died. He was writer's death on June 3 was confirmed by his husband, Michael Carroll, and agent Bill Clegg, The New York Times, The Guardian and NBC News report. White collapsed while waiting for an ambulance after experiencing stomach illness symptoms, though an official cause of death has not yet been released. White was born on Jan. 13, 1940 in Cincinnati. His parents divorced when he was a child, and White moved around the country with his mother, Delilah, and sister, Margaret. White came out to his mother when he was a teenager, and was sent to a psychiatrist. "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," the author wrote in his 1991 essay 'Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf.' Though he was accepted to Harvard for college, White decided to attend the University of Michigan, in order to stay closer to his therapist. He majored in Chinese before he moved to New York in 1962, where he worked at Time-Life Books. White became immersed in the city's LGBTQ+ scene, and recounted seeing the Stonewall leaving the city to live in Rome and work as an editor for The Saturday Review in San Francisco, White returned to New York in 1973. 'I was writing all the time and I was considered a good journalist but I had no idea if I could write a novel,' White told The Paris Review in 1988. 'Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone — that became my sole criterion.' White published his debut novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973. Over the course of his career, White wrote more than 30 books. One of his most notable works was the 1982 semi-autobiographical novel A Boy's Own Story, now seen as a cornerstone of LGBTQ+ literature. The novel was also the first in trilogy, later followed by The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).White's nonfiction also included the 1977 book The Joy of Gay Sex, which he cowrote with his therapist Charles Silverstein. Inspired by Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex, White's book served as both a manual and a narrative about life in the gay community. His other nonfiction books included States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (2009) and The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, published in January 2025. White also authored several biographies of notable French writers, including Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust and Jean Genet (Genet: A Biography was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize). The author also documented his time living in France in the 2014 memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in taught creative writing at Brown University and Princeton University. In 2019, he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.'It's never a day job; it's always a tremendous challenge,' White said of his work in a 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'People always ask me, 'Do you ever start a book and then put it aside and do something different?' And, unfortunately, no, I always write everything right to the bitter end." Read the original article on People
