Edmund White, queer literature trailblazer, dead at 85
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On Wednesday, White's husband, Michael Carroll, said the author had suffered a "vicious stomach bug" that caused him to collapse, although the exact cause of his death is not clear, The New York Times reports.
White was considered a courageous trailblazer for being candid about topics that were considered taboo at the time (and unfortunately still are, even today). Notably, he was present at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 when its historic uprising took place. In April 2019, White recalled those experiences at Stonewall in his foreword to 2019's The Stonewall Reader.
White had been in an open relationship with Carroll since 1995 (CNN), and they married in 2013. White had once opposed marriage for same-sex couples because he considered it assimilationist, but in 2012 he wrote that he became pro-marriage equality once he realized "how opposed to it the Christian right is in our country."
White also was open about being a person living with HIV — even in the 1980s, when the taboo surrounding the virus was at an all-time high. In 1982, he helped found Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the first organizations addressing the AIDS epidemic. Over the years, he survived two strokes and a heart attack.
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He was hailed as "the godfather of queer lit" by the Chicago Tribune, and the author's impact on gay literature was evident in his 1973 debut novel, Forgetting Elena, and the career-defining 1977 book The Joy of Gay Sex. He had just released a new book — The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir — in January.
White's best-known works also included 1978's Nocturnes for the King of Naples, 1980's States of Desire, 1982's A Boy's Own Story, 1988's The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and 1997's The Farewell Symphony, to name a few.
Beyond his work in fiction and self-referential nonfiction, White authored high-profile biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. The Genet biography was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Over the years, White received accolades such as the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (1983) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1993).
Filmmaker Tiziano Sossi released a documentary in 2007, Edmund White: A Conversation in New York, in which the author was seen recalling legendary encounters with people like writer Truman Capote and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
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White was born in Cincinnati and lived in Michigan, Illinois, and Texas after his parents divorced when he was 7. He attended the University of Michigan and moved to New York City after graduating in 1962, taking a job at Time-Life Books.
The experience of observing Stonewall was life-changing, he recalled. 'Up till that moment we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term. Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda,' he wrote in the memoir City Boy. Shortly afterward, he quit Time-Life and devoted himself to writing and teaching.
He was a member of the gay writers' salon known as the Violet Quill, along with Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, and others. In 1980-1981, the group would meet to read and critique one another's work. Picano died in March at age 81. White collaborated with Charles Silverstein on the original edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, and Picano joined Silverstein in writing subsequent editions.
"While some of his peers tried to separate their sexuality from their work, Mr. White embraced the term 'gay writer,'' the Times notes. 'If I'd been straight, I would have been an entirely different person," he wrote in City Boy. "I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.'
Additional reporting by Trudy Ring
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