Washington (AFP) – Edmund White, the influential American novelist who chronicled gay life and his own sexual odyssey through his work, including dozens of books, several short stories and countless articles and essays, has died, his agent said Wednesday. He was 85.
“Ed passed last night at home in NYC (New York City) of natural causes,” agent Bill Clegg told AFP, adding that White is survived by his husband Michael Carroll and a sister. The literary pioneer’s books include “Forgetting Elena,” his celebrated debut novel from 1973, “A Boy’s Own Story,” his 1982 coming-of-age exploration of sexual identity, and multiple memoirs, notably a revelatory “The Loves of My Life” published this year.
Homosexuality was at the heart of his writing — from the 1950s, when being gay was considered a mental illness, to the sexual liberation after the Stonewall riots in 1969, which he witnessed firsthand. Then came the AIDS years that decimated an entire generation. White himself would be affected directly — he was diagnosed HIV positive in 1985 and lived with the condition for four decades.
With an acerbic wit, White also wrote of his efforts — brief and ill-fated as they may have been — to lead a heterosexual life. “When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty,” began his personal essay in a 2005 edition of The New Yorker magazine. “Who was I to reject an honest woman’s love? Was what I was holding out for so much better?”
Tributes to the award-winning writer poured in on social media, including from his longtime friend and fellow prolific author Joyce Carol Oates. “There has been no one like Edmund White!” Oates posted on X. “Astonishing stylistic versatility, boldly pioneering subject matter; darkly funny; a friend to so many over decades.”
The Booker Prizes — which White judged in 1989 — posted on X that there was “great sadness” in its headquarters over his death, and praised “his joyously wicked sense of humour.” White taught writing at Yale and Columbia universities in the late 1970s. He also worked as a journalist. He lived in Paris for about 15 years and was an avid traveler, spending years researching biographies of French authors Jean Genet and Marcel Proust.
He co-wrote “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a how-to guide and resource on relationships, which was a queer counter to “The Joy of Sex,” the hugely popular 1972 illustrated sex manual. In the 2010s, White suffered two strokes and a heart attack. But he kept writing. In this year’s “The Loves of My Life,” he recalled all the men he had loved — White numbered his sexual partners at some 3,000. The New York Times described the book as “gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender.”
White himself acknowledged that literature was a powerful conduit for revealing the intimate sides of ourselves. “The most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books,” he once wrote.
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