Edmund White, groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85

New Indian Express

05-06-2025

Childhood yearnings
White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer 'who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.' His mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping.' Trapped in 'the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay 'Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,' published in 1991.
As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.
'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?'
He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel 'Caracole.'
'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote.