Edmund White, novelist and nice chronicler of homosexual existence, dies elderly 85

Edmund White, the American author, playwright and essayist who attracted approval for his semi-autobiographical novels akin to A Boy’s Own Story – and actually wrote the e book on homosexual intercourse, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died elderly 85.

His dying was once showed to the Guardian through his agent, Bill Clegg, on Wednesday.

White was once a big affect on trendy homosexual literature, with LGBTQ+ writing prizes named after him and authors together with Garth Greenwell, Édouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor and Alexander Chee all noting his significance. Having arise within the overdue 1970s, he as soon as stated of his technology: “Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for straight readers. We had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. We didn’t have to spell out what Fire Island was.”

Born in Ohio in 1940, White grew up in Illinois. He was once approved to Harvard however as a substitute selected to wait the University of Michigan to be able to keep close to his therapist, who had confident White he may “cure” homosexuality; a choice he would contact on in his novels. He then moved to New York, then San Francisco, the place he started a occupation as a contract author and later {a magazine} editor.

His 1973 debut novel, Forgetting Elena, was once praised through Vladimir Nabokov as “a marvelous book”. It was once adopted in 1977 through The Joy of Gay Sex, a pioneering intercourse handbook White wrote together with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. “I think if I wrote it alone it would have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex,” White as soon as joked to the Guardian. “[Silverstein] brought in the warm, cuddly part.”

For a lot of White’s occupation he drew on his personal existence to put in writing novels about homosexual males and sexual freedom. Arguably his best-known paintings, 1982’s A Boy’s Own Story, was once the primary in a trilogy that drew on his existence from boyhood to center age, adopted through The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).

White lived in France between 1983 and 1990, the place he befriended the likes of Michel Foucault and evolved an passion in French literature, occurring to put in writing admired biographies of Jean Genet – which received White a Pulitzer prize – in addition to Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.

Over his occupation, White wrote greater than 30 books. Some of his extra notable novels integrated The Married Man, which additionally drew on his existence, and Fanny: A Fiction, a ancient novel concerning the writer Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright.

He additionally revealed 5 memoirs: My Lives in 2005; City Boy, about his existence in New York within the 1960s and 1970s, in 2009; Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, in 2014; The Unpunished Vice, about his tastes in literature, in 2018; and The Loves of My Life, about his prolific intercourse existence, in 2025. White estimated he slept with 3 males every week for 20 years; in 1970s New York, he wrote: “I thought it was quite normal to take a break from writing at two in the morning, saunter down to the piers, and have sex with 20 men in a truck. When I wrote that I’d had sex over the years with 3,000 men, one of my contemporaries asked pityingly: ‘Why so few?’”

White was once identified HIV sure in 1984. “I wasn’t surprised, but I was very gloomy,” he informed the Guardian in January. “I kind of pulled the covers over my head and thought: ‘Oh gee, I’ll be dead in a year or two’ … it turned out that I was a slow progressor.”

White taught at Brown University and was a professor of ingenious writing at Princeton University.

White is survived through Michael Carroll, his husband and spouse of just about 30 years.