A love letter to Edmund White (1940-2025)

"The patron saint of queer lit" was the gift that kept on giving--in bed as well as in text

Dear Ed,

First, an apology: I should have sent this when you were still alive, and a long time ago. Perhaps you would have basked in the fawning adoration of yet another younger writer citing you as a formative influence. More likely, having received far too many such letters to count, you would have yawned. But now that you’re dead—and just in time for a Pride Month full of tributes—I’m sending it anyway.

What does one say to such a prolific gay man of letters, the author of thirty-three books and thousands of articles in a career that spanned more than half a century? Although you wrote for mainstream publications (including highbrow literary journals such as London Review of Books and New York Review of Books), drawing a broader readership as a result, your main target audience was gay North American men like me. In putting a mirror to our lives, reinforcing how we saw and expressed ourselves in a world hostile to our sexual orientation, your work made such a difference that your legacy is inestimable.

How critical was the existence of openly gay literary expression to the development of gay pride itself? You proved how critical, in one book after another—and no doubt will once more, posthumously, when your final novel, The Spirit Lamp, comes out.

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What difference did you make for me? For starters, it goes without saying that neither The Rice Queen Diaries nor Double Karma would have seen the light of day had you not burst into the publishing world decades earlier with such uninhibited writing about gay sex, desire, and longing as in Nocturnes for the King of Naples and A Boy’s Own Story, as well as in non-fiction such as The Joy of Gay Sex (co-authored with Charles Silverstein) and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. But never mind little old me. Literary titans from Alan Hollinghurst to Colm Tóibín have weighed in since your death with gushing appraisals of your work and your influence on them.

My own dearly departed friend and mentor, Stan Persky, whose demise preceded yours by eight months, would have said much the same. As contemporaries born a year apart, you both spent the better part of your childhoods in Chicago. Your fathers were very different—yours was transactional, Stan’s was an intellectual—but as writers the two of you shared the same earnest curiosity in stripping sex of its moral encumbrances, revealing layers of its character in every sort of encounter. But you, Ed, got started on this sort of writing much earlier than Stan. And since Stan read everything, his own gay trilogy (Buddy’s: Meditations on Desire, Then We Take Berlin, and Autobiography of a Tattoo), could not help but bear traces of your thinking.

Given how much has evolved both in gay consciousness and in society’s response to homosexuality since World War II, it’s a wonder you kept your head above water through so many transitions in the public sphere while surviving psychotherapy, party drugs, HIV, political correctness/wokeness, and the various slings and arrows of literary envy; that in later years you continued writing about the contemporary world without getting “cancelled” or sounding like some bitter old queen, on the contrary retaining your sense of wonder and curiosity. You also resisted the fashionable categorizations of the post-modern academe. “One nagging trouble with discussing a gay male sensibility—or any sensibility at all—is that we would feel uncomfortable referring to a ‘black sensibility’ or a ‘Jewish sensibility,” you wrote, in a 2012 review of David M. Halperin’s How to Be Gay. “When a sensibility is attributed to a group it sounds like a prejudice.”

During the mid-1950s, as Hollinghurst reminds us in his Guardian tribute linked above, you were “a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a ‘cure.’” Then you were “a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York,” a period in which you co-founded the Violet Quill Club, a septet of the first post-Stonewall generation of gay writers. Then you were “a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 90s.” (More than just a witness: you were one of the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. You were a leader.)

Your gravitas well established by the new millennium, you entered your senior years rolling with the zeitgeist while compromising nothing of your personal ethos. Instead of retiring from sex life, you doubled down on it. Instead of lamenting the death of “cruising” culture, you embraced social media, discovering a veritable goldmine of hookups through Silver Daddies. You neither promoted gay marriage as the ultimate goal of liberation nor condemned it as bourgeois assimilation. Instead, your views evolved until you ended up marrying Michael Carroll, with whom you’d already been intimate for nineteen years. That was in 2013. Michael was with you until the end, and he was there through all the lovers and flings you enjoyed well into your seventies.

Earlier this year, you published The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, a book every author in the world secretly wishes they could write if only they had enough material. I mean, people think that I’m a slut because of the aforementioned RQD. But you, Ed, were every bit as prolific in bed as you were in your writing. And you hung out with the sort of crowd where you could tell someone you’d had three thousand sex partners, and they would say “Why so few?”

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Of course—and I mean literarily speaking—you were not to everyone’s taste. Daniel Mendelsohn thought you were a little too fond of name-dropping. “When Edmund White writes about the work of a contemporary author,” began his NYRB review of City Boy, “he often finds a way to include an anecdote that shows he has some personal connection, some social or even sexual history, with the writer in question.” Other gay folks were squeamish about the unfiltered boldness of your outness, your lack of inhibition. I suppose that your working class and Gore Vidal’s blue blood sensibilities were bound to clash sooner or later. In 2009, a fictionalized encounter between Vidal and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, in your play “Terre Haute,” implied that the famous author had the hots for a terrorist. For this Vidal called you “a filthy low writer” and dismissed “Terre Haute” as “vulgar fag-ism.”

Your response in Salon, I suspect, has aged better than Gore’s politics:

He signed off on it. Now, late in the day, he’s decided he doesn’t like it, or maybe he forgot—he drinks a lot. The tension for the [Gore-inspired] character is that he doesn’t actually approve of what McVeigh did, but he’s attracted to McVeigh as a man and as a personality—whereas Gore actually approves of what McVeigh did and thinks he’s a great freedom fighter. That’s complete lunacy. Gore wanted me to rewrite it to show a lot more sympathy toward McVeigh, but I thought that would lose about 99 per cent of the audience. I don’t approve of killing hundreds of people in the name of some abstract ideal…

Back in the late Seventies, Susan Sontag had warned you against coming out publicly, regarding it as professional suicide. Clearly you regarded Sontag’s moral absolutism, her ideological sternness, as a source of amusement: you included an unflattering, thinly-veiled caricature of her in your 1985 novel, Caracole. She ended your friendship because of it, demanding the deletion of her blurb from A Boy’s Own Story.

Such writerly feuds entertained your fans, but they could not have been much fun for you—especially not the one with Larry Kramer. A comrade in arms at GMHC, Larry was disappointed when you moved to Paris and spent seven years doing the research and writing to produce Genet: A Biography (Knopf, 1993). He thought you should have stayed back in New York, writing only about AIDS. I remember becoming disillusioned with Kramer the moment I learned that, which was after I read your astonishing, magisterial portrait of France’s “thug of genius.” Yes, we can be heroes, and the ACT-UP founder was certainly one of those. But we can also be philistines.

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Not counting The Violet Quill Reader, a collection of writings by you and the rest of the group (Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, Christopher Cox, and George Whitmore), or the 1992 reissue of The Joy of Gay Sex (for which you wrote the preface but Picano replaced you as co-author), I have more than a dozen of your books in my home library. Strangely, they don’t include two of the most important and among my favourites, A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty. I’m certain I read and possessed both, and now I recall what happened: sometime during the early 90s, I lent them to a young lover who never returned them after our fling was over. A verdict on my attentions, I suppose, though I’d prefer to think it was because your books were worth stealing. I do still have The Farewell Symphony, which movingly completed the trilogy some years later.

Unlike you, I was raised Roman Catholic and remained a virgin until my mid-twenties. So when your work came to my attention during the mid-1980s, first through your essays and reviews, I began reading you from the closet. A few years later, you were a reassuring guide as I came out: writing for all gay men, regardless of our experience, you made observations that spoke to every aspect of our lives and the many ways that our difference separated us from the straight world. Even though yours was an American milieu, your rendering of it spoke volumes to this Canadian. Here's a moment from A Boy’s Own Story that every adolescent gay boy—even today, with so many victories behind us—would recognize:

I hypothesized a lover who would take me away. He’d climb the fir tree outside my window, step into my room and gather me into his arms. What he said or looked like remained indistinct, just a cherishing wraith enveloping me, whose face glowed more and more brightly. His delay in coming went on so long that soon I’d passed from anticipation to nostalgia…I expected him to be able to divine my existence and my need, to intuit that in this darkened room in this country house a fourteen-year-old was waiting for him.

One mainstream prejudice you fought against in the early years was the assumption that gay fiction couldn’t be any good. “Straight critics were quick to point out,” noted David Bergman, in his introduction to The Violet Quill Reader, that gay fiction lacked “the universality, the depth of feeling, the connectedness to normal human life, that was the privileged condition of straight writers.” Gay fiction’s best revenge since then has been to prove those bigots wrong so many times that any of those critics still alive today would deny having ever held such a stupid opinion.

You got away with a lot during your career. Most impressive was the free pass you received, more or less, for disregarding traditional boundaries between genres. You made auto fiction work for you. Among other things, it gave you the advantage of using some of the same material, in different ways, over the course of several books. I can recall a sense of familiarity around certain events or characters between the trilogy and later works such as City Boy and Jack Holmes and His Friend. And yet it all seemed fresh and original.

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I was in Thailand in January when Bloomsbury announced the publication of The Loves of My Life. I was impatient to get my hands on a copy, but the book wasn’t available overseas so I had to wait until I returned home at the end of March before getting one. Once I did, I finished it in a few sittings. A couple of things stuck with me. First, I was amazed you were still publishing, given your recent health issues. But then, as I kept reading, I felt something elegiac about the book, a sense that you were putting it out now because you knew it would be your final word on desire, your most important subject. The other thing was remembering just how much of an equal opportunity slut you actually were:

Eros at least crashed through class barriers. I seduced or hired men of all creeds, races, and ages, though irrationally I favoured the young. Had I run after older men with some power and wealth, I might now be in a less precarious position financially, or at least I might better understand the world… Not that I haven’t been to bed with many old, obese men. I used to think I could have been in a harem since I could find any roly-poly pasha sexy. I could find at least one square inch somewhere that was desirable, or more likely a dramatic role that would excite me…

This passage, and others, reminded me of an essay I wrote in 2009 called “When Eros Meets Daddy.” Published in an anthology, I Like It Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire (Arsenal Pulp Press), the essay was about the kind of sex I didn’t like, a declaration of my ageism: “I have never consummated an erotic encounter with someone much older than myself.” From this I posed several questions:

Why was it so hard to share my body with someone older? Was it really so precious a gift to give away? Why could I not appreciate the experience these men had to offer, both between the sheets and out in the world? Did I not see the advantage that a fling with an elder might give me, in so many different ways? Or was I too much of a control queen to risk vulnerability with someone who had the wisdom to see right through me?

Had you and I ever met, I’m fairly certain we would have had lots to talk about. And I’m sure I could have sustained your interest long enough for you not to get bored. I’m equally certain you would have qualified as “someone who had the wisdom to see right through me.” And so, since you always said you could never really know a person until you’d had sex with them, it’s possible that, over a glass of wine or two, you may have put my vulnerability to the test.

You were twenty-four years my senior, Ed, and obese. But damn it, you could be charming. And so, if it happened that you wouldn’t have minded getting naked with me, and told me so in good humour, I hope I would have possessed the grace and good manners to agree.

Forever grateful,

DG