Edmund White might have invented the unapologetic queer on the page. At least he did for me. Nothing coded gay, vaguely tragic; nothing furtive or metaphorical or obscured behind the billowing curtains of literary flounciness.
I can still recall the thrill of spotting the cover of his 1983 novel “A Boy’s Own Story” in a rotating rack of paperbacks in a bookstore in my dull, conservative hometown, Marlborough, England. I must have been about 15. It was the mid-1980s, the thick of the AIDS plague, and gay men were being cast as vectors of their own destruction.
It was a complicated time to be thinking about coming out. But here was a novel with a boy on the cover who looked close to my age, his thick glossy hair gently ruffled by the wind, his lips plump, his jaw strong. His tank top revealed the slope of his shoulders, the contours of his biceps.
I’d never seen a cover or read a book that spoke to me like that. The fact that a gay teenager could exist in fiction blew my mind. The fact that one, like me, could exist in the world did, too. “A Boy’s Own Story” was daring not just because it placed a queer adolescent at its center, but also because it did so with sophistication, introspection and horniness. The narrator — clearly, as with all of his narrators, based on him — is vividly real.
Ed White and I were later to become friends, when I had moved to New York and was editing Out magazine. This was not a surprise: Ed, who died on Tuesday at 85, was always very open to meeting young literary men. He was a raconteur and had stories for miles. I lapped them up. We all did.
Talking frankly about sex was a hallmark of his writing.(Among his many nonfiction works was “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a sex manual he co-wrote in 1977.) He always saw himself as a gay writer for gay readers, the distinction he drew between his generation of queer writers and those who came earlier, like Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. They might write gay characters, but they never seemed to be writing for gay readers. Ed was.
The Stonewall riots of 1969, which he took part in, had reshaped him. Before Stonewall, “we had always thought of ourselves as a diagnosis, as a malady,” he once told me, echoing the medical establishment’s view of homosexuality. “Suddenly, it was all switched, and we were a minority. I saw myself as a freedom fighter. It mobilized my anger. I just think anger towards other people is better than self-hatred.”
His most recent book, “The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir,” published in January, continued that fight to just tell his story, both his own and also, though the details might vary, all queer people’s. Ed had no patience for prudes, and he loved to talk about young lovers who were “gerontophiles,” a word he clearly relished. He didn’t care for respectability. “Gay men have seldom been candid about their sex lives and are even less so now they are getting married and fathering offspring,” he wrote in a rather salty foreword to “The Loves of My Life.”
Off the page, he was just as defiant. The British writer and playwright Neil Bartlett recalls attending a lavish soiree in Paris in 1984, hosted by Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, a society fixture. Mr. Bartlett was Ed’s companion for the night, and was, at Ed’s insistence, seated next to the host despite his wearing eyeliner, a chain around his neck and jeans peppered with so many holes you could see right through them. “I have never been prouder to be someone’s piece of rough trade,” Mr. Bartlett said.
One virtue of being a pioneer of autofiction: Everything is already out there. Ed never felt the need to censor himself. “From the beginning of his writing career, White enjoyed shocking readers in the spirit of Jean Genet, on whom White wrote a wonderful biography,” said the writer and academic Blake Smith. “You can find basically every sexual scenario from incest to cuckoldry to hustling in his novels — and a lot of it in his memoirs as well!”
The last time I saw Ed was on April 7, in what would be the final on-camera interview for a documentary Brian Montopoli and I are making. Ed was eager to plumb his memories, even if the names sometimes took a little longer to surface. Sitting in his small apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, I felt that I had stepped into a vanished New York, one where books spilled from the shelves and the walls were crowded with art from friends — including a portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe of Ed with Truman Capote.
Whenever I visited, I’d bring a cake or cookies, and we’d sit at the cluttered dining table, while Ed brought me up to speed on what he’d read, who had visited, and what he was working on. He was always working on something. That never changed. A new novel was underway, he told us; another had just been sent to his agent.
We talked a lot about the legacy of the Violet Quill, a group of seven gay writers that met irregularly in New York in 1980 and 1981 and that included Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano George Whitmore and Ed. Four died during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mr. Picano died in March. Only Mr. Holleran now remains.
On that last visit, we landed on our documentary’s working title: “The Winter of Edmund White,” a nod to his age, but not to his spirit, which remained impish, magnetic and razor sharp. When the subject of death arose, he was characteristically unflinching. “The dying part I don’t look forward to, but being dead is OK. It’s like being asleep,” he said. Then, with that sly, knowing smile of his, he added, “I guess I think if I keep writing, I won’t die.”
On that score, he was right. Through his books, Ed endures. He embraced the role of gay elder, guiding generations who came to him for direction and support. No one was better read or more willing to share what he had read. His apartment was a kind of salon, where he and his partner, the writer Michael Carroll, hosted a rotating cast of artists, writers and thinkers. He was so generous with his time, and endlessly curious.
So many younger writers owe their careers to his encouragement and support (he was prolific at writing blurbs for debut authors’ books), and in a sense they could be called his progeny. “He was like my N.Y.C. parent,” the writer Christopher Bollen replied when I texted him to commiserate. “I’m so heartbroken. But also so lucky.”
A revelation from that last interview was that Ed still met weekly with a boyfriend from his teenage years. For someone who had lost so many friends and lovers, this struck me as profoundly poignant, but it also exemplified Ed’s idea of queer or chosen family, long before the term became hackneyed. He had gone through AIDS, and contracted H.I.V. in 1984. He understood that queer family was all he had.
Writing for Ed was a confessional. In more than 30 novels and memoirs he revisited much of the same territory, even when his books were set in the future, like his 2022 novel, “A Previous Life,” in which he explored a devastating affair with a young Italian aristocrat by imagining his former lover as a ridiculous old man looking back on a forgotten gay novelist called Edmund White. What an audacious move for an octogenarian novelist. He was also a stylist, one who cared about sentences, but he also liked to “roughen up beautiful surfaces,” to quote the writer Garth Greenwell, another White protégé.
“If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance, we should recognize we’re still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen — and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know,” he wrote in “The Loves of My Life.”
Most important, he understood that our stories had to be written so they could not be undone, and that books were the last defense against erasure. That his death should come on the same day that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of vessels honoring prominent civil rights leaders, including Harvey Milk, is the kind of bitter coincidence that probably would have made him laugh.
Not that he craved straight society’s approval. Edmund White had no use for shame, and in both life and work, he refused to sand down the edges of queer existence to make it palatable. Acceptance was never the point. Truth was.
Aaron Hicklin runs One Grand Books in Narrowsburg, N.Y., hosts the radio show and podcast “Shelf Life” and is director of Deep Water Literary Festival. He was editor in chief of Out magazine from 2006 to 2018.
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