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BBC News
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Haitang: China is cracking down on young women who write gay erotica
"I've been warned not to talk about it," the woman wrote, before revealing snippets of the day she says she was arrested for publishing gay erotica."I'll never forget it - being escorted to the car in full view, enduring the humiliation of stripping naked for examination in front of strangers, putting on a vest for photos, sitting in the chair, shaking with fear, my heart pounding."The handle, Pingping Anan Yongfu, is among at least eight in recent months which have shared accounts on Chinese social media platform Weibo of being arrested for publishing gay erotic fiction. As authors recounted their experiences, dozens of lawyers offered pro bono least 30 writers, nearly all of them women in their 20s, have been arrested across the country since February, a lawyer defending one told the BBC. Many are out on bail or awaiting trial, but some are still in custody. Another lawyer told the BBC that many more contributors were summoned for had published their work on Haitang Literature City, a Taiwan-hosted platform known for its "danmei", the genre of so-called boys' love and erotic fiction. Think of it as a gay version of Fifty Shades of Grey: a BDSM relationship that leads to a happily-ever-after. That's a frequent trope, across historical, fantasy or sci-fi settings. Over the years it has cultivated a fiercely devoted following, especially among young Chinese authors are being accused of breaking China's pornography law for "producing and distributing obscene material". Writers who earn a profit could be jailed for more than 10 law targets "explicit descriptions of gay sex or other sexual perversions". Heterosexual depictions often have more leeway - works by acclaimed Chinese authors, including Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, have graphic sexual scenes, but are widely available. Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more. Volunteers in a support group for the Haitang writers told the BBC police even questioned some who reported being arrested declined to be interviewed, fearing repercussions. Police in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, who are accused of driving this crackdown, have not responded to the the crackdown has unleashed a debate - and a rarer pushback against the law."Is sex really something to be ashamed of?" a Weibo user asked, arguing that China's anti-obscenity laws are out of touch. Another wrote that women never get to decide what is obscene because they don't control the narrative. Even legal scholars have expressed concern that just 5,000 views for anything deemed "obscene" qualifies as criminal "distribution", lowering the bar to arrest made Beijing uneasy enough that discussions have been vanishing: #HaitangAuthorsArrested drew more than 30 million views on Weibo before it was censored. Posts offering legal advice are gone. A prominent Chinese news site's story has been taken down. Writers' accounts, and some of the handles, are also Pingping Anan Yongfu's post went viral, she deleted it and wrote another, thanking supporters and admitting her writing had violated the law. She then deleted her that last post, she had written: "I was always the good girl in my parents' eyes. But that day, I brought them nothing but shame. They'll never hold their heads up again." Danmei: The uncrowned royal of pop culture These women have long worked in the shadows in China, where homosexuality and eroticism are stigmatised. Now outed by police investigations, they face social consequences that are as brutal as the legal ones. "In that moment, all I felt was shame," posted a writer whose Weibo handle translates to "the world is a huge psychiatric hospital". She said the police pulled her out of class in college - and her classmates watched as they followed her to search her dorm."I earned my money word by word at a keyboard. But once it went south, it was as if none of that mattered. People treated me like I'd made money without ever working for it."Another wrote the police had been kind, advising her to speak to a lawyer and return her "illegal earnings" to reduce her sentence. "I'm only 20. So young, and I've already ruined my life so early."A third said: "I never imagined a day would come when every word I once wrote would come back to haunt me."One author who has been writing danmei novels for 20 years was not questioned but she says the crackdown won't stop her. "This is how I find happiness. And I can't let go of the connections I have made with the community."Inspired by Japanese boys' love manga, danmei emerged as a sub-genre online in the 1990s. It has become hugely successful, with some of the novels appearing on international bestseller lists. In 2021, 60 of them were optioned for film and TV adaptations. The most expensive IP reportedly sold for 40 million yuan ($5.6 million; £4.1 million). Some of China's biggest stars, such as Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, began their careers on streaming shows based on danmei novels. In short, it's the rebellious royal of pop culture - too popular to ignore, too controversial to it is a signature offering on Haitang, which, in Mandarin, is a flower that blooms in every shade of Haitang and danmei have flourished as uniquely female spaces, although they centre male protagonists. In a culture where female sexual desire is routinely policed, danmei beceme a coded, creative outlet - a space where women can write about female desire for other is exactly what makes danmei so "subversive", says Dr Liang Ge, who teaches digital sociology at University College London. It allows women to "detach from gendered realities", which they often associate with marriage and instance, in danmei stories, men can get pregnant and are at ease with being vulnerable – a stark contrast from the often unequal relationships many Chinese women struggle with in real life."Danmei frees me from thinking about all those potential dangers in relationships in traditional heterosexual romance," explains one writer who has been active in the danmei world for a novels are not without their critics, because some do contain extreme and violent scenes. "As a parent, how many of us can accept our children reading novels like this, let alone writing them?" asked one Weibo age of authors has also been a concern: a handful of those the BBC spoke to said they all started reading and writing gay erotica before they turned 18, some as young as 11. It's a problem the community should acknowledge and address, said Ma, a danmei writer who only shared her surname, adding that this is a problem for all adult content because China does not restrict content by danmei in particular has increasingly come under attack in the last decade as Beijing launched a series of campaigns to "clean up" the internet. In 2018 a danmei author was jailed for 10 years for selling 7,000 copies of her book titled Occupy. 'My earnings were evidence of my crime' As marriage and birth rates plummet, and China's leader Xi Jinping encourages a national rejuvenation, so state scrutiny of danmei has ratcheted up, Dr Ge says."The Chinese government wants to promote traditional family values and liking danmei novels is seen as a factor in making women less willing to have children," Dr Ge is the second wave of mass arrests in less than a year - late last year, some 50 Haitang writers were prosecuted. A famous author who earned about 1.85 million yuan was jailed for nearly five two crackdowns are similar, according to a lawyer who had represented some of the defendants last year, "but this time, even those with minor involvement weren't spared".A lawyer offering free legal advice said more than 150 people requested consultations in just two days. Many of those contacting her had not been charged yet - they were terrified about the possibility though."This is classic offshore fishing," says a lawyer who authored a "practical guide" to assist Haitang writers. The term refers to overreach by local police - those in Lanzhou summoned writers in various places, arguably beyond their reported paying out of pocket to fly to Lanzhou. One posted that the 2,000 yuan earned from two books on Haitang paid for the year too all the arrests were by police in Jixi County in eastern China. Indebted local governments have done this before to earn revenue through fines, sometimes forcing a warning from the central government. Cyber crimes are particularly prone to this "as long as they claim a local reader was corrupted", the lawyer says. Danmei writers know tolerance can be fickle. It's why they skirt censorship with metaphors. "Making dinner" means sex; "kitchen tool" is code for male the recent crackdown stunned them. "A phone call shattered my dreams," is how one writer described the call from accused police of searching their phone without a warrant. They said their crime was assessed by adding up the views for each chapter - a method they argued was misleading, as it likely exaggerated the danmei author posted: "I wrote on Haitang for years, with only a handful of readers. Then, those overlooked stories accumulated over 300,000 clicks, and the 4,000 yuan in royalties sitting in my account became evidence of my crime."It's hard to know if this spells the end of their careers on Haitang."If I could go back, I'd still choose to write. And I will keep writing," wrote the handle Sijin de Sijin."Right now, I can only hope the law will see beyond the words on the page - and see the girl who skipped meals to save money, the girl who sold her hair to buy a pen, the girl who believed her mind could carve a way through fate. I hope it gives all of us a fair chance."Additional reporting by Grace Tsoi in Hong Kong
The Independent
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. "I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. ' Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life," he said. "Ed invented so many of us." White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: "How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story." He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated," he said. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex." He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. "He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'
Associated Press
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. 'I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. 'Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life,' he said. 'Ed invented so many of us.' White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: 'How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story.' He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated,' he said. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex.' He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. 'He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'
Irish Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Writers remember Edmund White: The chronicler, artist and patron saint of queer literature
Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted acclaim for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy's Own Story – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died aged 85. Over his career, White wrote more than 30 books and was a major influence on modern gay literature. Here, Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones and more recall the high style and libidinous freedom of a writer who 'was not a gateway to gay literature but a main destination'. 'He loved gossip and intrigue' – Colm Tóibín, novelist Edmund White wrote with style; he cared about style; he made it seem natural and effortless. He wrote and indeed spoke with a kind of delightful candour. He loved revelation and gossip and intrigue. The idea that everyone he knew had secrets fascinated him. He chuckled a lot. He read all the latest French novels. He saw no reason why he should keep things to himself and, because he was gay in a time when gay life had not appeared much in fiction, that became one of his great subjects. A Boy's Own Story, which came out in 1982, had enormous influence. It was an essential book for several generations of gay men. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, White charted the changes and the tragedies of the gay life that had seemed so promising in A Boy's Own Story. READ MORE In writing about gay characters, White also became one of the chroniclers of city life, especially New York and Paris . (During a brief stay in Princeton, he suggested that the only relief from tedium was to howl nightly at the moon.) White was in full possession of a prose style that was deceptive in how it functioned. His writing could feel like conversation or someone thinking clearly and honestly or taking you slowly into his confidence. The cadences were close to the rhythms of speaking, but there was also a mannered tone buried in the phrasing, which moved the diction to a level above the casual and the conversational. The book of his that I love most is his 2000 novel The Married Man, which is a kind of retelling of Henry James's The Ambassadors. White dramatises with considerable subtlety the conflict between the idea that the personal is political ('which,' White wrote in 2002, 'may be America's most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics') and the legacy of Vichy France filled with secrecy and ambiguity and the ability to live several compartmentalised lives. In the recent years, White's apartment in Chelsea, shared with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, was a centre of fun and laughter, a place where you got all the latest news. Books were piled up. They, too, were treated as kind of news. He worked every day, writing at the diningroom table. He made light of his illness. He was, in many essential ways, a lesson to us all. 'He showed me gay fiction could also be high art' – Alan Hollinghurst, novelist Edmund White in 1986. Photograph: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Edmund White's luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a 'cure'; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye. What amazed me about A Boy's Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller. It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It's hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close. 'He brought a lightness into my life' – Yiyun Li, author Edmund White in 1988. Photograph: Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media via Getty Images About 10 days ago, when I left the east coast for a book launch in London, Edmund and I were in the middle of reading Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel. 'Don't you worry, darling, we'll finish when you get back,' he said. Edmund and I were close friends for the past eight years. At the beginning of the pandemic, we met at 5pm on Skype, Monday through Friday, which became our two-person book club. This continued after the pandemic. The first book we read was The Complete Stories by Elizabeth Bowen. Between that collection and The Hotel, my estimation is that we read between 80 and 120 books. Sometimes we marvelled with fake shivering ( Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, for instance). Sometimes we compared our underlined parts in the books, and when we found we underlined the same adjective, the same phrase, or the same paragraph, we pretended, once again, to be surprised. When we read Henry Green's novels, Edmund would act the dialogues out in a British accent. There was a detail from a Yasunari Kawabata novel that we returned to often as a private joke: 'Are you low on B?' (As in Vitamin B.) 'Yes, I feel low on B.' This would be the closest that we would admit that we were feeling saddened by the losses in our lives. Edmund lost many beloveds to Aids; I lost two children to suicide. And yet there was never a heaviness in our conversations. I think Edmund brought a lightness and a cloudlessness into my life. We gossiped, we giggled, and sometimes I would stare at my little screen, dumbfounded, when Edmund enlightened me with a graphic reminisce of gay sex from 20 or 30 years ago, in a castle or back alley in Europe. Then we would stare at each other before bursting into laughter. When we first read Bowen together, sometimes Edmund or I would say, 'I wish I could write like this.' And the other person would repeat, 'I wish I could write like this.' In a few days, I shall return to the US where Edmund Valentine White III is no more, and I shall finish The Hotel by myself. Neither he nor I will make our friendship into fiction. I wish I knew a pair of characters like us in literature. 'I gave his novel a bad review – which positively inflamed his charm' Adam Mars-Jones, novelist Author Edmund White at his home in New York in 2019. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP I met Ed White in London in 1983, at the time of the UK publication of A Boy's Own Story. I had reviewed the novel for Gay News, and he knew that my verdict was unfavourable but not what my objection was (I described it as a cake that had been iced but not baked). This didn't deter him from making a conquest of some sort – a degree of resistance could positively inflame his charm. We took a stroll round Covent Garden. I bought him a punnet of whitecurrants, a fruit with which he was unfamiliar, though feigning ignorance to please me would have been perfectly in character. He must have registered my lack of carnal interest but went on sexualising our promenade, asking me if one bystander was my type, telling me that another had given me the eye. To have become his friend without even a moment of sexual closeness was, a least at that time in the New York gay world, an anomaly and perhaps even a distinction. I visited Ed several times in Paris, sleeping on the daybed in his enviable flat on the Île Saint-Louis. In the morning he would help his ex-lover John Purcell get ready for a day of graduate study, a routine – as he was well aware – with overtones of a mother packing her son off to school. We would have one more cup of coffee and listen to some chamber music, Poulenc a favourite. Then he would say, 'I must get back to the darling novel' (he was working on Caracole at the time), and lie on his bed to write in longhand. I loved those visits, and some of that was down to Paris, but most to his hospitality. For a night in he might buy rabbit loin in mustard sauce pre-prepared from a traîteur, unthinkable sophistication. It was from him I learned that 'cutting the nose off the brie' was not just bad mannersBrie I hadn't known, but a named crime. He was writing a monthly column for American Vogue, socialising was a job requirement as well as a pleasure. Even so, I was mildly scandalised that his French literary friends took it for granted that he would pick up the tab in restaurants. Priggishly I would treat him to a meal now and then, though I think he took more pleasure in largesse than in the presumption of equality. 'He expanded the bounds of what could be written about' – Olivia Laing, writer Edmund White in his New York home in 2016. Photograph: Ethan Hill/New York Times I saw Edmund White on the A train once, like glimpsing an emperor in the grocery shop. I must have been barely in my teens when I first read A Boy's Own Story, the Picador paperback with the brooding boy in a purple vest on the cover. I was seduced by everything: the lovely, supple, almost shimmering language, the explicit precision applied to sex and class. Cornholing, a word I'd never heard before. Above all, it held out an invitation. It was from White that I realised a writer takes the rough material life gives – unwanted, shabby, maybe repellent – and makes it their own by way of sensibility and style, that alchemical translation. Years later, I met him. He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring's Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now. 'His work was as fresh as gay bar gossip' – Mendez, novelist Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I'd found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that's not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day. 'He showed us what was really going on' – Tom Crewe, novelist Edmund White in New York City, 2000. Photograph: David Corio/MichaelEdmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the 'San Francisco look': A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume. But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic's outsize impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn't memorialise a lost Eden – 'Gay life,' White said, 'will never please an ideologue; it's too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.' At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered 'an unusual degree of integration with the straight community' worthy of remark: 'A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.' It's a reminder of how amazingly far we've travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn't think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-pend pointwas just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn't ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, 'is some give in the social machine'. 'His books were a fabulous reel of anecdote and savage humour' – Seán Hewitt, writer Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy's Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White's camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him forever. White's books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference. In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: 'Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West's hit comedy Sex: 'She's flushin' my play down the terlet!''. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I'm grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page. – Guardian
News24
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- News24
Groundbreaking voice of gay literature, Edmund White, dies at 85
Edmund White, pioneering gay writer and influential figure in 1970s gay literature, has died aged 85. Best known for A Boy's Own Story (1982), he transformed narratives of gay life and shaped the coming-out genre. An activist, biographer, and prolific storyteller, White's works spanned decades, celebrating LGBTQI+ identity with authenticity and wit. The pioneering gay writer Edmund White died aged 85. Diagnosed with HIV in the late 1970s, he often said he had not expected to live nearly as long as he did. White was a central figure in the emergence of openly gay writing in the 1970s, a core member of the group of New York-based writers who called themselves The Violet Quill. Before that, White noted, gay stories were written for straight people and almost always ended tragically. White was born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He was well-placed to symbolise and write about the then-widespread experience of gay men and lesbian women doing their utmost to get out of small-town USA and find freedom in the big city, usually New York or San Francisco. White described this experience and what followed in his first autobiographical novel, A Boy's Own Story, which made his name when it was published in 1982. South African Booker-winner Damon Galgut, in a 2023 interview with White, said he still recalled 'my double excitement' at reading A Boy's Own Story, 'not only at its subject matter – astonishingly 'new' at the time – but how richly it was rendered'. Galgut also complimented White on his 'deftness with the deadpan throwaway line'. American poet, critic and editor John Freeman said of gay men who read A Boy's Own Story when it came out that 'some of them... feel he saved their life. Some he made feel less alone. Then there are people he simply entertained, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more companionable storyteller'. He also noted that 'the category of coming-out story did not exist before he wrote A Boy's Own Story'. White had attended the University of Michigan before moving to New York, where he worked as a journalist for Newsweek, Time-Life, The Saturday Review, Horizon and The New Republic. His early pair of novels, Forgetting Elena (1973) and Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), were baroque stories with a touch of fantasy, but he also wrote The Joy of Gay Sex with therapist Charles Silverstein; it was a ground-breaking work of open-minded sexual exploration, published in 1977. White joked that had it not been for Silverstein's sex-positive influence, the book might have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex. White described gay life across the USA in States of Desire (1980) and published his autobiographical A Boy's Own Story in 1982. By then, the HIV/Aids pandemic was hitting gay men hard, and White was a co-founder of the activist group Gay Men's Health Crisis, though he moved to Paris in 1983. A Boy's Own Story would be followed, in due course, by The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), forming a trilogy of novels that could be said to have summed up gay life for American men over four decades. In France, White wrote a comprehensive biography of Jean Genet, a notoriously tricky figure in French literary history. The resultant tome, Genet: A Biography (1993), won many prizes, including the Pulitzer in the USA. Having published so much fictionalised autobiography, White's non-fiction autobiographical works came at the story of his life from an angle: My Lives (2005) worked through themes such as family, sex, art and therapy non-chronologically; City Boy (2009) focused on his life in New York, a city to which he had returned in 1990; and The Loves of My Life (2025) covered his wildly promiscuous and interesting sex life and long-term friendships. His essays were published in a collection entitled The Burning Library (1994). White's other novels include The Married Man (2000), Fanny: A Fiction (2003), Hotel de Dream (2007), Our Young Man (2016) and The Humble Lover (2023).
