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Atlantic
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Naughty Interpreter of Our Lives
Edmund White had the most beautiful blush. I recall watching him at a celebration of his work while one of his most sexually explicit essays (which is saying a lot) was read aloud—my mind had to perform its own gymnastics just to picture all the right organs in the right receptacles. Ed's blush somehow managed to overlap his cheeks and spread across his chin, his forehead, his ears, and into his greatest receptacle of all: his kindly, contemplative soul. No one blushed like Ed. And when you saw him blush, you saw a midwestern child still agog at the wide world and the fact that it would accept him. The path between his homeland of Cincinnati and the salons of New York and Europe seemed smoother than it had been, just like the ease and unaffected nature of Ed's prose hid the great artistry behind it. You could find Ed dining with Italian baronessas or at some unspectacular joint in Key West or within the wonderfully messy and book-strewn confines of his own apartment, and there would always be the same blush across his face. He giggled a lot. This may seem like an unimportant fact when talking about one of America's greatest writers, but Ed's giggle came from the same place as his blush. He giggled as if you were tickling him, like a naughty child perpetually discovering his naughtiness. Maybe that was the secret to Ed. The co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex was never jaded; he never let go of pleasure, even as age and illness conspired to take it away. He recently published one of his best books, The Loves of My Life, which, yes, is another Ed White memoir but is also a brilliant argument for the importance of sex and love, in all their conjoined variations, to the human animal and, by extension, to the artistic work we animals produce. In the age when the messy mechanics of sex have been asked to depart the page for the world of fetishized porn, Ed demanded that literature retain the ecstasy and desperation and glorious ridiculousness of two (or sometimes many more) bodies thumping against each other. He loved sex the way some of his younger contemporaries love recognition or a well-cooked egg at brunch. And the joy of love and sex and the joys of talking and writing were all intertwined in Ed's mind and work. I appreciate gossip myself, but Ed turned gossip into an art form. To hear him gossip was music. He was breathless, engaged, in love with the tale he was telling. And because of the mastery with which he was able to process the endless social parade in front of him, his gossip was a form of prepublishing. People, myself included, told Ed everything, both because we loved him and ached to see him giggle and because we wanted him to be a naughty interpreter of our lives. It is customary in an appreciation of this sort to mention when one met the recently departed, but I honestly can't remember. I would guess it was 23 years ago, because as soon as you published your first book, there was Ed in all his blushing, giggling glory. And often next to Ed, holding a single malt, there would be an unsmiling writer of great pretension looking down at you from a great height. I knew immediately which kind of writer I wanted to be. I remember one drunken night walking through the inner rooms of his apartment as an outrageous party unfolded in the main quarters, taking photos (with an early phone that was barely up to the task) of his bedroom and bathroom, all of it unremarkable and slathered in normalcy, and thinking, This is what a great writer's home should look like. The lessons of his life and work are there on every page of his books, a portable MFA for the taking. Keep your eyes open, record everything, fall in love constantly, radiate kindness whenever you can, even when you have to dig deep through the morass of history, biography, and bigotry to find it. Many of my best writer friends have passed away in their 50s; Ed lived a full life by every measure, and still his passing is a unique form of loss. No one out there has even a tenth of his blush.
France 24
6 days ago
- Health
- France 24
Pioneering US novelist Edmund White put gay life on the page
Homosexuality was at the heart of his writing from his earliest books when being gay was considered a mental illness, to the sexual liberation after the Stonewall riots in 1969, which he witnessed firsthand. Then came AIDS that decimated an entire generation of gay men, and from which White was directly affected after being diagnosed HIV positive in 1985. An influential author, prolific journalist, literary critic and teacher, he penned more than 30 books that took in fiction, biography and memoir. Adored by Nabokov He was celebrated from the get-go with his first novel, "Forgetting Elena" (1973), praised as a marvelous book by the Russian master Vladimir Nabokov. White followed it up with the very explicit "The Joy of Gay Sex" (1977), a kind of illustrated Kama Sutra that became a gay reference across the US. "A Boy's Own Story" (1982) began what would become an acclaimed fictional series inspired by the different stages of his own life. He lived in Paris in the 1980s and wrote authoritative biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud, three iconic French homosexual figures. He wrote several memoirs in the 2000s, always with his acerbic wit, including his last book published earlier this year, "The Loves of My Life". In it he recalled all the men he had loved -- White numbered his sexual partners at some 3,000. The New York Times described the book as "gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender". New York freedom Born on January 13, 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, White grew up in Chicago. His father was a womanising entrepreneur and his mother a psychologist. When White told her aged 14 that he preferred boys she sent him to several psychiatrists to try to rid him of his "illness". But early on he decided to embrace his sexuality, not hide or repress it. After studying Chinese at the University of Michigan, he fled the Midwest to follow a lover to New York. He freelanced for Newsweek and worked for several years at the publishing house Time-Life Books, before hitting success with his own books. His literary renown opened the doors to teaching at prestigious US universities, including Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale and Princeton. Back in New York after his time in Paris, he settled with his partner, writer Michael Carroll, who was 25 years his junior, whom he married in 2013. He survived HIV and two strokes and a heart attack in the 2010s.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85
Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted acclaim for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy's Own Story – and who literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died aged 85. His death was confirmed to the Guardian by his agent Bill Clegg on Wednesday. White was a major influence on modern gay literature, with LGBTQ writing prizes named after him and authors including Garth Greenwell, Edouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor and Alexander Chee all noting his importance. Having come up in the late 1970s, he once said of his generation: 'Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for straight readers. We had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. We didn't have to spell out what Fire Island was.' Born in Ohio in 1940, White grew up in Illinois. He was accepted to Harvard but instead chose to attend University of Michigan in order to stay near his therapist, who had assured White he could 'cure' homosexuality; a decision he would touch on in his novels. He then moved to New York, then San Francisco, where he began a career as a freelance writer and later a magazine editor. His 1973 debut novel, Forgetting Elena was praised by Vladimir Nabokov as 'a marvelous book'. It was followed in 1977 by The Joy of Gay Sex, a pioneering sex manual White wrote with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. 'I think if I wrote it alone it would have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex,' White once joked to the Guardian. '[Silverstein] brought in the warm, cuddly part.' For much of White's career he drew on his own life to write novels about gay men and sexual freedom. Arguably his best-known work, 1982's A Boy's Own Story, was the first in a trilogy that drew on his life from boyhood to middle age, followed by The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). White lived in France between 1983 and 1990, where he befriended the likes of Michel Foucault and developed an interest in French literature, going on to write admired biographies of Jean Genet – which won White a Pulitzer prize – as well as Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. Over his entire career White wrote more than 30 books. Some of his more notable novels included The Married Man, which also drew on his life; Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel about the author Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright. Over his career he published five memoirs: My Lives in 2005; City Boy, about his life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, in 2009; Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, in 2014; The Unpunished Vice, about his tastes in literature, in 2018; and The Loves of My Life, about his prolific sex life, in 2025. White estimate he slept with three men a week for 20 years; in 1970s New York, he wrote: 'I thought it was quite normal to take a break from writing at two in the morning, saunter down to the piers, and have sex with 20 men in a truck. When I wrote that I'd had sex over the years with 3,000 men, one of my contemporaries asked pityingly: 'Why so few?'' White was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984. 'I wasn't surprised, but I was very gloomy,' he told the Guardian in January. 'I kind of pulled the covers over my head and thought: 'Oh gee, I'll be dead in a year or two' … it turned out that I was a slow progressor.' White taught at Brown University and became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. White is survived by Michael Carroll, his husband and partner of almost 30 years.
New York Times
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In His 80s, and Recalling All the Men He's Loved Before
Some people celebrate turning 85 with grandchildren, gardening or a nice cake. Edmund White has published a sex memoir. 'The Loves of My Life,' which follows 'My Lives,' (2006) City Boy' (2009) and recollections of Paris and reading, is gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender: a guided tour of a foreign land — foreign to this female hetero at least — where libido is the wellspring of just about everything. It's far from a solemn capstone to White's long and distinguished career. More like a mischievous rock-skipping in the moonshadow. 'We'd dance in the nude in the dark,' he rhapsodizes of an entanglement with a ballerino, 'or rather he'd dance and I would stumble about, like Bottom pursuing Titania, breathily caressing him across those bare boards in front of those walls of mirrors illuminated just by the distant, feeble streetlights.' This is a PG-rated passage from a book for which we should claw back the now-cursed letter X — as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent. White's escapades include streams of urine ('We both competed for it like seals begging for fish. I make it sound comical but it was as serious as a christening'), flexing bowels, pubic lice, an incalculable amount of semen. The revolution will not be sanitized. Devoted fans might find some of the material familiar. White recaps his body count (some 3,000 men: 'One of my contemporaries asked pityingly, 'Why so few?'') and revisits that William Blake line about sooner strangling an infant in its crib than nursing unacted desires. Readers who have encountered White before will not be surprised either to find mentions of kilts, and Proust. But though I'm not a White completist — by his count he's written 32 books, including novels and biographies, and there's also the occasional play — I'm not sure he's ever delivered it in such concentrated, gleeful hits. Prose poppers, with a few poems as well. White is not just a Bottom but, as he'll tell you 90 percent of men in New York City are, a 'bottom,' preferring to be penetrated. On Page 1 he mentions his small penis — later modified to 'tiny.' He has long worried about his weight, and struggled with self-acceptance even as he wrote the classic manual 'The Joy of Gay Sex' with one of his therapists. In one instance he imagines himself Mr. Snuffleupagus from 'Sesame Street'; in another he rues his 'feeble filiform arms, these useless pale appendages.' Yet who better than a beast to assess and appreciate a beauty? 'His complexion was faultless and glowing, as if a light were shining through the best Belgian linen,' White writes of Stan, a depressive aspiring actor with whom he cohabited long ago in New York (touchingly, they're still in touch). Of a Spanish Ecuadorean man he met more recently on a website called SilverDaddies: 'Pedro had a delicate, shame-faced manner, as if he'd just broken an expensive goblet and was tiptoeing away from the shards.' A blond Floridian body builder's impressive member, when tumescent, is compared to 'the Christ Child in its hay crèche.' White has told the story of his Midwestern Gothic family before, but there are more peeks here. His grandfather was a Klansman and the racist senator Strom Thurmond was a distant cousin, the memory of which quickly chills White's adventures with a sexual 'slave.' In shocking passing he mentions that his sister was impregnated at 13 by their horrible father, and survived to become happy and productive and at work on her own memoir. Their mother, a psychologist from Texas and an alcoholic, 'colonized every corner of my mind she could understand and made me pick her blackheads and put her into her Merry Widow foundation garment.' Despite these glimpses, though, the narrative roves and alights rather than burrowing. White's husband, Michael Carroll — they've been together since 1995 — appears only in the acknowledgments and a fleeting anecdote about a pickup on an airplane. 'I've always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off,' White writes. While seeming to hold back nothing, he clings to what is most essential. Danger colors the entire book, first that of being discovered, shunned, blackmailed, robbed, arrested and jailed; then of AIDS; White, who found out he was H.I.V. positive in 1985, outlived many lovers and friends. 'We should also recognize we're still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen — and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know,' he writes. He has witnessed and endured so very much: the upholstered repression of the 1950s, the way the orgiastic 1970s reassessed the '60s as a time of 'misguided rhetoric, bad haircuts, and fake velvet and near-fur,' the fearful '80s and the dashed promise of the internet. In the current political climate, twisting back toward repression, 'The Loves of My Life,' slim as it is, lands louder and prouder than it otherwise might have.
