Edmund White, who mined his own life story, including his vast and varied catalog of sexual experiences, in more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of articles and essays, becoming a grandee of New York literary life for more than half a century, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his husband, Michael Carroll, who said the author collapsed while weakened by “a vicious stomach bug.” The precise cause of death is unknown. Mr. White had been H.I.V. positive since the 1980s and survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014.
Mr. White’s output was almost equally divided between fiction and nonfiction. Many of his books were critical successes, and several were best-sellers. The Chicago Tribune labeled him “the godfather of queer lit.”
He was a star almost from the beginning. The New York Times called “Forgetting Elena” (1973), about the rituals of gay life on a fictionalized Fire Island, “an astonishing first novel, obsessively fussy, and yet uncannily beautiful.” His second novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” (1978), took the form of letters from a young gay man to his deceased ex-lover.
“A Boy’s Own Story” (1982), a tale of coming out set in the 1950s, was narrated by a teenager who bore more than a passing resemblance to a young Mr. White. His other semi-autobiographical novels, “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” (1988) and “The Farewell Symphony” (1997), follow the same unnamed protagonist into adulthood during the 1960s, then through the horrors of AIDS as he approaches middle age.
His nonfiction works included a number of memoirs. “My Lives” (2005), one of his best-reviewed books, chronicles his first 65 years, with chapter titles that include “My Shrinks,” “My Hustlers” and “My Blonds.” He zeroed in on his life in 1960s and ’70s New York with “City Boy” (2009), and on his life away from New York with “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris” (2014).
Earlier this year, he published “The Loves of My Life” — a “sex memoir,” as he called it — describing encounters with some of the 3,000 men he said he’d had sex with. In a review, Alexandra Jacobs of The New York Times called it X-rated, “as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent.”
His nonfiction works also include biographies of the French authors Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.
Over the seven years that Mr. White spent researching and writing “Genet” (1994), he traveled extensively, visiting the far-flung haunts of his peripatetic subject. His frequent companion was Hubert Sorin, a young French architect whom Mr. White called “the love of my life” and who died of AIDS in 1994.
The “Joy of Gay Sex” (1977), a how-to based on the 1972 best seller “The Joy of Sex,” was a groundbreaking effort that became somewhat obsolete once fears of H.I.V. made safe sex necessary. Its co-author was Charles Silverstein, a therapist who had been treating Mr. White until a publisher suggested that they collaborate, not knowing they were already well acquainted.
Other nonfiction books included “States of Desire” (1980), a travelogue of gay America on the eve of the AIDS epidemic. Mr. White visited a dozen U.S. cities and regions, where old and new acquaintances helped him investigate gay life. But he later had second thoughts about it. In an afterword to its sequel, “States of Desire Revisited” (2014), he noted that the first book gives “a strangely lopsided view of American gay life.”
Specifically, he wrote, it “scants older men and married men, it says nothing of gay Asians or gay Jews, it largely overlooks gay working-class men.”
“Worse,” he added, “it gives highly colored but doubtlessly distorted views of the cities I write about. My only justification is to point to my method: these are travel notes in which I recorded my impressions.”
Edmund Valentine White III was born in Cincinnati, the second child of Delilah (Teddie) White, a school psychologist, and Edmund Valentine White II, a chemical engineer and, according to his son, “a famous womanizer.” But that was the least of the sexual complications in Mr. White’s childhood. He wrote that his father had molested Edmund’s older sister, Margaret Ann, and that he, Edmund, fantasized about seducing the elder Mr. White. When Mr. White was 7, he wrote, his father left his wife for a younger woman.
After his parents divorced he moved between Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Texas as his mother sought steady employment. He spent summers at his father’s cottage in Walloon Lake, Mich.
At the Cranbrook School for Boys, outside Detroit, his writing was notorious. Sex, he wrote in “The Unpunished Vice,” “had already become my great theme in all its many forms.” He went on to study Chinese at the University of Michigan, having turned down Harvard because his therapist in Detroit insisted that he continue treatment there.
After graduating in 1962, he moved to New York, where he worked for Time-Life Books and did his own writing at night.
Mr. White was passing by the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village, during the early morning of June 28, 1969, when the police raided it and were met by fierce resistance by patrons in what became known as the Stonewall Riot. Forty year later, in “City Boy,” Mr. White wrote of the significance of Stonewall:
“Up till that moment we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term. Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”
He left Time-Life later that year. He spent six months in Rome in 1970, then moved to San Francisco to work as an editor for The Saturday Review. He returned to New York in 1973 and threw himself into his writing. He often found sex by cruising the streets or the piers but, he told T magazine in 2024, “to make myself stay in and write, I would hire hustlers.”
Therapy was a constant in Mr. White’s life. His mother was a school psychologist who, in Mr. White’s telling, had practiced on her son, administering a series of Rorschach tests at home and diagnosing him as “borderline psychotic.” While Edmund was still an adolescent, a psychiatrist labeled him “unsalvageable.”
For several decades, Mr. White’s therapists, with his encouragement, tried to “cure” him of homosexuality, which at the time was considered a mental illness. A more successful form of therapy was writing, he said. Writing, he told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2006, “has always been my recourse when I’ve tried to make sense of my experience or when it’s been very painful.”
He began that form of therapy early. “When I was 15 years old,” he said in the same interview, “I wrote my first novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels. So I was really inventing a genre.”
It is an invention to which he devoted much of his career. While some of his peers tried to separate their sexuality from their work, Mr. White embraced the term “gay writer.” As he explained in “City Boy,” “If I’d been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.”
His life provided ample material for the prolific writer he was. “White has accumulated enough sexual partners,” Peter Conrad wrote in The Guardian in 2005, “to fill the telephone directory of a moderate-sized city.”
Mr. White never suggested otherwise; he described countless encounters with a clarity that has shocked more than a few readers. In defense of his tendency to describe his sexual proclivities in detail, Mr. White wrote in “City Boy”: “What we desire is crucial to who we are.”
In 1995, he began a relationship with Michael Carroll, a writer 25 years his junior. The men lived together in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and married in 2013. But Mr. White had no intention of being monogamous. In 2006, he told The Sydney Morning Herald that their relationship “is probably like an 18th-century marriage in France.”
“You know,” he said, “where you each have lovers and you go your own way sexually but you esteem each other, you’re totally devoted.”
In addition to his husband, he is survived by his sister, Margaret.
Mr. White often searched for “masters” who would dominate him. He was in his 60s when one sadomasochistic relationship, with an out-of-work actor half his age, ended. “I completely fell apart,” he wrote in 2018 in “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading.” Though he had endured painful breakups before, this time, he wrote, “I was crying all the time, even in the train, even in front of my students.”
Again he used writing as therapy. He continued: “I wrote about my master as faithfully and honestly as I could, and I even read the chapter out loud to him for his approval, which he gave me at the time. Later he felt I’d ‘used’ him, but by then it was too late; the book was already published.”
Mr. White was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his biography about Mr. Genet. He won countless other awards for his writing (though few for his many plays, which tended to be unsuccessful); he also sat on countless award juries. He taught writing at several universities, including Brown and Princeton, where he was on the faculty from 1999 to 2018.
He was one of seven members of The Violet Quill, a gay writers’ group founded in 1979 that included the soon-to-be celebrated authors Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. The members met regularly to critique one another’s work. In 1982, he helped found the group Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City.
In 1983, he moved to Paris, where he planned to spend a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship but ended up staying until 1998. He discovered that he was H.I.V. positive in 1985. Four of the seven members of the Violet Quill succumbed to the disease, as did his two closest friends, the literary critic David Kalstone and his editor at Dutton, Bill Whitehead, and scores of other friends and lovers.
In 2000, Mr. White told The Guardian about living to old age while so many gay men died young.
“I do feel some degree of guilt,” he said. “It’s also hard not to feel numb, and the worst thing for a writer is to feel numb. Your natural tendency is to want to forget; but your deepest sense of duty and obligation is to history and to the people you knew and loved.”
Mr. White had many decades to fulfill that obligation. He produced some of his most original work while in his 80s. In “A Previous Life” (2022), a married man and woman holed up in a ski chalet in 2050 share their sexual histories, including details of the husband’s affair 30 years earlier with an elderly writer. The writer is named Edmund White.
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