Latest news with #TheVioletQuill
Indian Express
5 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.
News24
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- News24
Groundbreaking voice of gay literature, Edmund White, dies at 85
Edmund White, pioneering gay writer and influential figure in 1970s gay literature, has died aged 85. Best known for A Boy's Own Story (1982), he transformed narratives of gay life and shaped the coming-out genre. An activist, biographer, and prolific storyteller, White's works spanned decades, celebrating LGBTQI+ identity with authenticity and wit. The pioneering gay writer Edmund White died aged 85. Diagnosed with HIV in the late 1970s, he often said he had not expected to live nearly as long as he did. White was a central figure in the emergence of openly gay writing in the 1970s, a core member of the group of New York-based writers who called themselves The Violet Quill. Before that, White noted, gay stories were written for straight people and almost always ended tragically. White was born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He was well-placed to symbolise and write about the then-widespread experience of gay men and lesbian women doing their utmost to get out of small-town USA and find freedom in the big city, usually New York or San Francisco. White described this experience and what followed in his first autobiographical novel, A Boy's Own Story, which made his name when it was published in 1982. South African Booker-winner Damon Galgut, in a 2023 interview with White, said he still recalled 'my double excitement' at reading A Boy's Own Story, 'not only at its subject matter – astonishingly 'new' at the time – but how richly it was rendered'. Galgut also complimented White on his 'deftness with the deadpan throwaway line'. American poet, critic and editor John Freeman said of gay men who read A Boy's Own Story when it came out that 'some of them... feel he saved their life. Some he made feel less alone. Then there are people he simply entertained, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more companionable storyteller'. He also noted that 'the category of coming-out story did not exist before he wrote A Boy's Own Story'. White had attended the University of Michigan before moving to New York, where he worked as a journalist for Newsweek, Time-Life, The Saturday Review, Horizon and The New Republic. His early pair of novels, Forgetting Elena (1973) and Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), were baroque stories with a touch of fantasy, but he also wrote The Joy of Gay Sex with therapist Charles Silverstein; it was a ground-breaking work of open-minded sexual exploration, published in 1977. White joked that had it not been for Silverstein's sex-positive influence, the book might have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex. White described gay life across the USA in States of Desire (1980) and published his autobiographical A Boy's Own Story in 1982. By then, the HIV/Aids pandemic was hitting gay men hard, and White was a co-founder of the activist group Gay Men's Health Crisis, though he moved to Paris in 1983. A Boy's Own Story would be followed, in due course, by The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), forming a trilogy of novels that could be said to have summed up gay life for American men over four decades. In France, White wrote a comprehensive biography of Jean Genet, a notoriously tricky figure in French literary history. The resultant tome, Genet: A Biography (1993), won many prizes, including the Pulitzer in the USA. Having published so much fictionalised autobiography, White's non-fiction autobiographical works came at the story of his life from an angle: My Lives (2005) worked through themes such as family, sex, art and therapy non-chronologically; City Boy (2009) focused on his life in New York, a city to which he had returned in 1990; and The Loves of My Life (2025) covered his wildly promiscuous and interesting sex life and long-term friendships. His essays were published in a collection entitled The Burning Library (1994). White's other novels include The Married Man (2000), Fanny: A Fiction (2003), Hotel de Dream (2007), Our Young Man (2016) and The Humble Lover (2023).
