Author of The Joy of Gay Sex, Edmund White, dies aged 85

Renowned gay novelist Edmund White has died at the age of 85.

The news was confirmed to The Guardian by the author’s agent, Bill Clegg, on Wednesday morning (4 June), who said the novelist died the previous evening while waiting for an ambulance, having experienced stomach issues.

White is survived by his husband and partner of 30 years, the writer Michael Carroll.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1940, White studied Chinese at the University of Michigan, having turned down an offer from Harvard, graduating in 1962. Against the wishes of his therapist, who it appears practiced some form of conversion therapy, White moved to New York to be with a male lover and was a witness to the Stonewall riots in 1969.

His first novel, Forgetting Elena, was published in 1973. The book follows a young gay man who visits the homosexual haven of Fire Island.

He followed that up in 1977 with perhaps the book possibly best-known to LGBTQ+ readers, The Joy of Gay Sex. White wrote the manual with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, whom he credits with bringing the “warm, cuddly part,” according The Guardian.

White went on to help Larry Kramer set up the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, in the wake of the Aids crisis in the 80s. He would be diagnosed with HIV in 1985.

In 1983, he moved to the French capital where he lived until 1990, a period he’d later chronicle in his 2014 memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. He wrote and published four other memoirs: My Lives, in 2005, City Boy, four years later, The Unpunished Vice, in 2018, and The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, which came out earlier this year and in which discussed his love life. He estimated that over the course of his life he’d slept with 3,000 men, and also documented his one heterosexual affair.

White often drew on personal experiences for his writing, particularly for the trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), all of which will probably be well-known to gay men for their tales of a young man’s growing experience of homosexuality, starting in 50s and spanning five decades.

He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his biography of the French novelist Jean Genet, and wrote biographies of novelist Marcel Proust and poet Arthur Rimbaud.

White was also known as an educator, holding positions at a number of universities, including Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Brown and Columbia’s School of the Arts.

Speaking to PinkNews in 2012, he described the writing process as “both angst-ridden and pleasurable”, adding: “It does seem to me that writing a novel is so precarious. It’s as though you’re carrying a bucket of water up a hill and you’re not quite sure you’re going to make it.”

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