June 4, 2025, 12:36pm
Edmund White has passed away, and the world has lost a pioneering and passionate writer. He wrote beautifully and frankly about sex and gay life during his prolific career as a novelist and journalist, and prided himself on a view of queerness that was uncompromising and unapologetic. “Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for straight readers,” he once said. “We had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. We didn’t have to spell out what Fire Island was.”
His first novel from 1973, Forgetting Elena, about gay life on a fictional Fire Island, was praised by Vladimir Nabokov as “a marvelous book.” White is perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical A Boy’s Own Story and the sex guide The Joy of Gay Sex, which he wrote in 1977 with psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. I particularly like Nocturnes for the King of Naples, his second novel, which is a series of sometimes funny and oftentimes poignant letters from a young man to an unnamed, dead former lover.
White won many awards, including a Pulitzer for his biographies of French writers. He became a great chronicler of French literature, and lived and worked in France for years. I love this detail from Interview where he rolls his eyes at Michel Foucault: “I invited him to a gay bar. He said it was hard for him to go out in Paris because he was too famous, and I said, ‘Oh, come on.’”
Interview also ran a wonderful piece where 18 men asked White questions about sex, in which he offered this wild and compelling pitch: “I think Gary [Indiana] should write Barron Trump’s fictional memoirs.”
White was always aware and reflective about the political valence of his work, and famously reevaluated the blindspots in his travelogue States of Desire. He also wrote an impassioned defense in 1979 of drag cultural and the power of problematizing gender for The Village Voice. “By embracing drags, lesbians, and especially gay men will take a step towards self-acceptance,” he argued. “By placing drags in a respected position within the movement, gays will have elevated and defended what straight society most despises in all homosexuals.”
His writing was often challenging, especially to straight norms. In an interview for Lit Hub with Damon Galgut, White talked about the power of destabilizing readers:
When I was young I read a remark of Paul Valery (cited by André Gide) that a writer should lose with every book the fans he might have gained with the previous one, which in my case, sadly, has come only too true.
From his unapologetically descriptive The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, Edmund wrote beautifully about his past lovers and in this passage excerpted for Lit Hub, about his infatuation with Keith McDermott:
Keith was careful with his “instrument,” i.e., his body. He drank tiny cups of liquid buffalo grass, ate sparingly, mainly vegetables, and visited the gym daily for two hours, where he’d twist and turn on the exercise rings, climb ropes, and strengthen his arms and core, his shoulders and legs, but he never wanted to become a heavily built muscleman. He was a Peter Pan, the puer aeternus. I was abject in my longing for him. I can’t bear to recall the scenes of my crawling toward him, arms outstretched, or the moment when I saw him as an emanation of God. Once I organized an orgy of several guys I dragged back from the Candle Bar in the neighborhood, hoping to be able to touch Keith in the melee. It worked.
In all of his work, he wrote beautiful descriptions of people, most especially the men he knew. Also from The Loves of My Life, excerpted in The Paris Review:
The Scot was tall and slender and decked out in full regalia—a kilt, a short black jacket with silver buttons, high socks, a sort of pouch or purse on a chain around his waist, the sporran. I knew that under the plaid kilt there was a dick and hairy balls, no underpants. He was younger than forty and had a wide mouth full of white teeth, blue eyes as blue and large as a songbird’s eggs if they’d been made of crystal, a sharp nose, and an accent that was almost intelligible, though less and less so as I became more and more stoned on the joints he was feeding me.
He was a great lover of books, and wrote a memoir about reading called The Unpunished Vice, in which he described the pursuit as a “passport”:
And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation. And, quite concretely, reading has always struck me as a passport to the world, one in which characters are more real than actual people, where values are more intense than in the dim light of reality, where characters fly up into destinies rather than paddle around in ambiguity.
He loved writing like he loved living. White was a devotee of experience, and never apologized for the joys of seeing, feeling, and writing:
I mean that I’m not an especially anguished writer; I tend to like what I write and am possibly satisfied too readily. When you finish reading a book like Lolita you feel that there’s nothing more wonderful in the whole world than writing a novel; you feel challenged and awake and alive, and you have a desire to write with the same keen response to the sensuous world.
He will be missed.