Edmund White is DEAD to ME!

He loved writing. And cock.

From his erotic memoir, published just a few months ago.

[quote]He loved writing. And cock.

Don't we all... (the last part).

His 50-something husband is posting pictures on IG, and people are offering condolences.

Nothing like the promise of a literary estate to spice up a 30-year age-gap relationship.

Got a link R4? It hasn't hit the web yet.

He was only 85? He’s been considered like the gay literary elder statesman for so long I thought he’d be over 100.

I liked his coming-of-age stories of adolescent sexual discovery. I lived vicariously through him, since I didn't get sexual until my early 20s.

He was a handsome young man.

He had lived with HIV since 1985 and survived multiple strokes and a heart attack.

It's hard to overstate his significance

But I can do it.

Edmund was an HIV "non-progressor", also known as long-term non-progressors (LTNPs) or elite controllers. His friends and lovers were decimated but Edmund was never going to be taken out by AIDS and much later there came quality treatments. Edmund was a generous soul and to continue on this theme, he was very active in early AIDS activism and HIV and gay mens health. R.I.P.

I met him once. He was charming and fun. When he signed my hardcover copy of Skinned Alive, I asked him to write something specific inside, for fun, which he did.

It says, “Dear X, I owe it all to you.”

[quote]It says, “Dear X, I owe it all to you.”

That's super classy. I like that - lucky you R13.

It has hit the news:

Here's Michael Carroll's (husband) Instagram. There as some sad posts there - the last one 36 minutes ago of a bunch of flowers he got for Edmund. Also one of the the kitchen sink with "the last traces of today".

R14, this was at a lesbian and gay bookshop in Chicago. I was a young writer and had adapted another writer’s novel to the stage and was performing that adaptation, he knew the writer so we had a lot to talk about. I had arrived early with a friend, about an hour before, and Edmund’s sister had driven him in from the North Shore, I think maybe Evanston, and there was nobody else there. So we had time to talk and goof around. That’s why I joked about the inscription or maybe he just did it. I can’t remember. I think we joked about it. Michael was there as well, we were both very young. Edmund gave me his contact details, said to look him up in Paris. I did go by his flat once in Paris a few years later but there was nobody home.

Brit here, so sad to wake up to this news. I kept up with Edmund White's phenomenal output after his breakthrough 'A Boy's Own Story'. So many of his books and interviews I've kept across the years in tribute to this blazing icon of gay Bohemia. I enjoyed seeing him a couple of times in London at book events. Loved his relish for all literature, quite apart from his own high talent, his autobiographical candour and insight.

It's a great loss; but White led an immensely full life, and leaves a huge legacy of work to inform, inspire and enjoy.

That's an absolutely amazing experience and life memory to have had R17! Thank you very much for sharing.

"White was present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when the Stonewall uprising began.[44] He later wrote, "Ours may have been the first funny revolution."[45] "When someone shouted 'Gay is good' in imitation of 'Black is beautiful', we all laughed... Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis".[46]

He was my prof and thesis advisor in college and we all had a lot of fun with Edmund. He was never in a crabby mood, despite trauma in his personal life. He was gossipy, as you all know and loved about him, and had a twinkle in his eyes. He was amused by young glamourpuss drama whereas must profs barely noticed or disliked that sort of stuff. But he liked boho kids as much as the jet set spawn and of course he was captivated by anyone gorgeous.

He sounds like he was a fun guy, but he did manage to live a very full life all the same despite getting HIV in 1985. Living to 85 with that diagnosis was an achievement all on its own, never mind his huge literary and social contributions

R10- He was obese too- those strokes and the heart attack might have stemmed from his obesity and not the HIV.

New York Times.

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 had slept with. In a review, Alexandra Jacobs of The Times called it X-rated, “as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent.”

Edmund after his 3,000th excavation.

Just woke up here, thanks to those who finally saw the news links and shared them.

A look back with Edmund White (2024)

Dennis Cooper interviews Edmund White (2014)

I guess some of you don't understand LTNP - elite controller of HIV. "Living to 85 with that diagnosis was an achievement all on its own". Well, it was fluke of genetics. Genetics protected him to the time, if it ever arrived, that he might need HIV treatment.

Ashamed to admit I've never read any of his work -- please DL gays tell me what to read. As in where to start etc

[quote]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 had slept with. In a review, Alexandra Jacobs of The Times called it X-rated, “as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent.”

3,000 men, and yet no one has asked the obligatory, "Who's had him?" yet. Surely one of the 3K must have been a Datalounger.

I'm curious as to how his literary reputation will rank with the passage of time. So many late 20th century writers have been forgotten by now, and that's when he did his best work.

Damn R20 - did anyone ask him who really threw the first brick?

In White's telling, some rough trade blew the first load all over that brick.

I doubt he was there (at Stonewall) the first night. Protests continued for multiple nights. He outlived most of his peers and was productive s o he'll always be on the list of seminal gay writers. Whether people might read him is another matter. There's been recurring re-discovery of James Baldwin but not Gore Vidal. His tendency toward marring his writing with TMI and the workshopped quality of his later work won't help his long-term reputation among actual writers, along with he and most of his peers being easily lumped together telling rather typical coming of age tales among the moderately well-off.

I wonder if John Rechy (who's older) will be next. He's probably a better writer and more skilled at sublimating his own self-involvement.

He hit me up on Manhunt about thirty years ago. He was lovely but we did not hook up.

He was hugely obese even then.

Serious writers don't write memoirs about how many guys they've slept with.

He only ever wrote about one thing - being gay - and that's not enough.

A good piece about him in The Guardian, as multiple famous writers, mostly gay (Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Hars-Jones, Olivia Laing) share their memories of him.

His personality really emerges from their memories of him: an intelligent, tasteful, kind, generous, charming, hardworking man, who loved gossip and was ruthlessly candid and who could often be exasperating.

Here's the Guardian piece:

R31 He became a gay icon, a famous writer, but I recommend his first two "smaller" novels: Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples. They are poetic, obscure, mysterious novels that capture a culture at a time it was breaking open and free. A young man's celebration of and in prose.

On another matter: I've quoted him to a lot of guys I wanted to seduce over the years. His story about his first sexual experience, as a young man cruising the park in downtown Cincinnati, an older traveling salesman came up to him to ask him to come to his hotel. "He said it would hurt, but I would like it. It did. I did."

I'm friends with Michael, Edmund's surviving husband. I understand age gap cynicism but they have really loved each other and built a life together going back 30 years.

R38: He did biographies, as well. He was at his best where he was either using his own experience or using historical materials (he'd worked for Time-Life books and probably had a lot of skill at dumbing down semi-scholarly sources). Where he had to truly use his imagination or fully realize people from outside his immediate experience, he wasn't so great.

R41, I've re-read both multiple times. Forgetting Elena is my favorite book. I've read everything of his but The Humble Lover, and that's on my nightstand to read next. Bittersweet news: a great author and person with a long, full life.

RIP.

I read one or two of Edmund White novels. They were okay but I definitely prefer Andrew Holleran. Holleran is not a prolific writer the way Edmund White was. My favorite Andrew Holleran books are Dancer From The Dance (1978) , The Beauty Of Men (1996) and a collection of short stories called In September The Light Changes ( 1999).

Holleran is so sad and depressing. I think White was uneven and repetitive, but never depressing.

I liked Hotel de Dream, his novel about Stephen Crane

Does this make Magic Johnson now the longest-surviving person with AIDS?

What about Greg Louganis?

R31: in the link below, Neil Bartlett in The Guardian answers some of your questions about which novels to read/where to start.

r41 thanks for that, I ordered those two. And went ahead and ordered City Boy because he looks so hot on the cover haha

To that list I'd add States of Desire, his 1980 non-fiction take on gay life in several major cities. May seem outdated now, but at the time was an invigorating and sex-positive chronicle of the country's gay mores. Written of course before the ravage of AIDS.

I read White sometimes with fervor, sometimes with exasperation. I'm an old queer but I have been shocked with some of his sex scenes. But I always found the sex writing to be honest and pure if grossly indelicate at times.

Every two or three years, I reread Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes, and Hotel de Dream. I also reread Fanny. I enjoy his lit crit and his books on Proust and Rimbaud. I've yet to tackle the book about Genet.

I grew up reading White and Holleran and they helped me understand some of my gay desires and to reckon with them openly.

RIP, dear Edmund.

R54, you'll love his book about Genet.

I read some of the novels, which I didn't think were all that wonderful - however, States of Desire was very good. Holleran writes very poetically. His work, which someone above described as sad and depressing, I would describe as haunting and elegiac. White's writing is more journalistic, in my opinion. It tends to tell stories directly without much attempt to draw the reader into the emotional life of the characters.

R56: White does things like tell you his Rorshach responses and his favorite kinks--pretty close to his emotional life.

I would still describe that kind of writing as reporting. Some authors are somehow able to make readers imagine that they are going through the same experiences themselves as the writer's characters are undergoing with the same emotional reactions.

Not yet mentioned is a play White wrote, 'Terre Haute.' In which EW so cheekily appropriated the characters of Gore Vidal and Timothy McVeigh, to create a riveting two-hander. Ian McKellen played the Vidal character in a radio version, Peter Eyre in an off-West End production I saw.

You can imagine Vidal's chagrin at being so deployed by his most prominent queer pretender to the crown. He sued White. Not much solidarity there. Still, the play remains as part of White's brilliant oeuvre. Quite apart from all his other accomplishments, White transformed - with novels. biographies, plays, memoirs and essays - the archaic worthy category of 'man of letters' into something daring, transgressive, exciting, in addition to always informative, intelligent, and stylish. No wonder Vidal was somewhat peeved at being overlapped by his younger more expansive contemporary.

Clearly White's publicist is not dead.

Two Things:

1. White's exhaustive biography of Genet is sensational. Absolutely worth reading.

2. My husband slept with Edmund. Once. And once was enough.

I've always liked him more as an avuncular and brilliant literary figure than I have enjoyed him as an actual writer. I've read Forgetting Elena, a Boy's Own Story, and Hotel de Dream, and could never get that into any of them--they always seemed too mannered for me. I found Nocturnes for the King of Naples impossible to get through.

I need to start over with him, I guess.

I found his works later - at the tail end of my “Must Read/See All Things GAY” phase.

It was 2004 and “Mysterious Skin” threw me into a serious funk. It was while reading “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” that I decided I don’t have to be up to date on every piece of gay media.

Gay fiction or non-fiction of a certain era always sounds like a travelogue.

With White and Holleran I had at least a sense of the inner lives of the people being written about.

I loathed Felice Picano's work, which could always be summed up as:

"I slept with the most manly, gorgeous man on earth. He was/is a military man/veteran/blue collar god, and had the largest measurable penis ever to exist on earth. We appeared at all the most fabulous parties, with all the most fabulous people ever to exist, wearing the most fabulous things ever to be made, and then......" (lather, rinse, repeat)

"Does this make Magic Johnson now the longest-surviving person with AIDS?"

No, but it may make him "the longest-surviving person with AIDS who won't admit he got it from gay sex". Does that count?

r65

gurrrlllll!

😄

I liked The Farewell Symphony. The Genet biography is excellent.

He never missed an opportunity to drag gays back a few decades by rehashing how much of a whore he was.

Long-term non-progressor indeed.

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 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 backlash of recent years.

“Longest-surviving ‘famous’ person”, quite possibly, R49.

R68 Well, the World Zeitgeist has certainly taken us back... to an oppressive puritanism, targeting the Other to exclude them from the liberties breaking out of cultures in the 60s and 70s. Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s were the bulwarks against economic liberations, but the rightist culture warriors saw that adding a Christo-Fascist movement to dominate populations with religious norms and admonitions against... well, gay people for a start. (Orthodox Jews and Islamo-fascists obviously part of this movement).

White came to his maturity in the breaking wave of these revolutions, these achievements of personal and psychological liberty. So to some "sexual freedoms" is simply one of many examples of that liberation. To others (R68) that kind uncomfortable and explicit challenges to religio-puritanical norms "drags gays back"...

I am in a monogamous marriage.... but I lived through the liberation movements (that contributed things to us like NOT putting gay people in jail simply for being gay). I am a member of a Christian church, but I abhor the Christo-fascist reinstitution of oppressive norms and attacks at any who deviate from those norms. It's a sad and dark century we are living through.

So thank you Edmund White for living a life of liberation, of wild and messy freedom, of a rush of the lifeforce that even now, especially now, makes some people squirm and judge. Thank you Edmund for your messy Light.

What R71 said. Its Christo-fascists and Islamo-fascists that will "drag gays back a few decades", not Edmund White rehashing how much of a whore he was, or anyone else whoring for that matter and being honest about it. Thank you R71 for saying what I was trying to put into words you done it much better than I could of

Long live Edmund White in spirit, long may others carry on his example

John Rechy 1963 City of Night

Now there was a travelogue and for its time quite shocking .

Rechy is a real contrast with White. He never wrote the kind of dull liberal arts major/college boy stuff of other gay authors. He's at least as self-involved and narcissistic as White, yet he writes vividly of the world around him. White is a skilled writer but his periodic self-disclosures really don't accomplish much beyond exhibitionism. Rechy is often disturbing but can also write in a more sympathetic way. I always found him more compelling than White.

R74 City of Night was Rechy's only real "breakthrough" prose. White wrote a ton of prose, in all forms.

City of Night was street, gritty, 50s shadowland of bars and hustlers and low life. Forgetting Elena and Nocturns for the King etc. were whimsical, poetic, opaque fictions about a more middle class kind of gay life.

To my mind they were both great, stunningly explicit writers. But comparing the two, "ranking" them, wasn't the point.

Beautifully and intelligently put, r71.

I guess some don’t consider Numbers or Rushes to be breakthrough prose.

Great commentary from the former publisher of Out.

By Aaron Hicklin Mr. Hicklin is working on a documentary about Edmund White. 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!”

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.

Because of White's death, I'm re-reading A Boy's Own Story for the first time since I was in college in the mid 80s.

I don;t remember it much because my memories of his early fiction was so overwhelmed by Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which i found very mannered. The level of detail is remarkable, and it's quite well written (it only becomes at rare times too precious). on the whole I'm enjoying it. It is a little odd how much sexual attention the main character attracts from random men and boys alike before he's even sixteen: he's like the underage male equivalent of the protagonist of "Rubyfruit Jungle." And yet somehow he doesn't think he's attractive. He's so berserkly self-absorbed it's hard to care much about him, but it's still a fascinating book.

And he was gay, not queer!

He lived just around the corner —on that evening I heard and then saw an ambulance in front of the “German” church—next door to his building. That must have been his last chariot ride, on it’s way to him.

He was a gross sex pig who wrote about sex piggishness in full sentences, which got him more attention than he deserved.

The former Out editor's maudlin memorial makes me cringe with embarrassment.

White was no intellectual or father of a movement — he was a socialite that in later years various C-list gay writers (including Christopher Bollen and Garth Greenwell) cozied up to for cred while White diddled himself.

R84 White may have been no intellectual in your view but I am pretty sure that he would know the correct application of “that” and “who”.

R85 = Aaron Hicklin, author of embarrassing NYTimes blowjob

R84 disdains raw pig sex. We get it.