EDMUND WHITE, American author, born (d: 6/3/2025); an American novelist, short-story writer and critic. He was a member of the faculty of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. White’s best-known work is A Boy’s Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographical-fiction series that continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, describing stages in the life of a Gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in these latter two novels are recognizably based on well-known individuals from White’s New York-centered literary and artistic milieu.
In his early years, at the Cranbrook School for Boys, outside Detroit, his writing was notorious. Sex, he wrote in “The Unpunished Vice,” “had already become my great theme in all its many forms.” He went on to study Chinese at the University of Michigan, having turned down Harvard because his therapist in Detroit insisted that he continue treatment there.
After graduating in 1962, he moved to New York, where he worked for Time-Life Books and did his own writing at night.
White was passing by the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village, during the early morning of June 28, 1969, when the police raided it and were met by fierce resistance by patrons in what became known as the Stonewall Riot. Forty year later, in “City Boy,” Mr. White wrote of the significance of Stonewall:
“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.”
An earlier novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) and a later novel The Married Man (2000) are also gay-themed and draw heavily on White’s own life. In 2006 he published a nonfiction autobiography entitled My Lives. It is unusual in that it is organized by theme, rather than chronologically. White’s autobiographical works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status. In Paris, in 1984, he was closely involved in the foundation of the French HIV/AIDS NGO AIDES.
Though he is openly Gay himself, not all of his works center on Gay themes. His debut Forgetting Elena (1973) is set on an imaginary island. The novel can be read as commenting on Gay culture, but only in a highly coded and indirect manner. Caracole (1985) centers on heterosexual characters, relationships, and desires. Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about Frances Trollope and Frances Wright. White’s play Terre Haute (2006) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner based on Timothy McVeigh is visited by a writer based on Gore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet.) He was co-author, with Charles Silverstein, of The Joy of Gay Sex (1977).
White has been influential as a literary and cultural critic, particularly on Gay issues and has become something of an eminence grise in Gay lit culture. He has received many awards and distinctions; among these, he is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et de Lettres, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 Governor Andrew Cuomo named White as State Author along with Yusef Komunyakaa as state poet.
Mr. White was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his biography about Mr. Genet. He won countless other awards for his writing (though few for his many plays, which tended to be unsuccessful); he also sat on countless award juries. He taught writing at several universities, including Brown and Princeton, where he was on the faculty from 1999 to 2018.
He was one of seven members of The Violet Quill, a gay writers’ group founded in 1979 that included the soon-to-be celebrated authors Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. The members met regularly to critique one another’s work. In 1982, he helped found the group Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City.
In early 2025, he published “The Loves of My Life” — a “sex memoir,” as he called it — describing encounters with some of the 3,000 men he said he’d had sex with. In a review, Alexandra Jacobs of The New York Times called it X-rated, “as in explicit, yes, but also excavatory and excellent.”
His nonfiction works also include biographies of the French authors Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.
Over the seven years that Mr. White spent researching and writing “Genet” he traveled extensively, visiting the far-flung haunts of his peripatetic subject. His frequent companion was Hubert Sorin, a young French architect whom Mr. White called “the love of my life” and who died of AIDS in 1994.
Other nonfiction books included “States of Desire”, a travelogue of gay America on the eve of the AIDS epidemic. Mr. White visited a dozen U.S. cities and regions, where old and new acquaintances helped him investigate gay life. But he later had second thoughts about it. In an afterword to its sequel, “States of Desire Revisited” (2014), he noted that the first book gives “a strangely lopsided view of American gay life.”
Specifically, he wrote, it “scants older men and married men, it says nothing of gay Asians or gay Jews, it largely overlooks gay working-class men.”
“Worse,” he added, “it gives highly colored but doubtlessly distorted views of the cities I write about. My only justification is to point to my method: these are travel notes in which I recorded my impressions.”