Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted his acclaims for his semi -autobiographical novels such as the story of a boy – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneer of joy of gay sex – died at the age of 85.
He died on Tuesday evening while waiting for an ambulance after experiencing symptoms of stomach disease. His death was confirmed on Wednesday at the Guardian by his agent, Bill Clegg.
White had a major influence on modern gay literature, with LGBTQ + prices which bear his name and authors, notably Garth Greenwell, Édouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor and Alexander Chee noting all of its importance. After coming in the late 1970s, he Once said of his generation: “The gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for hetero readers. We had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. We did not have to explain what Fire Island was.”
Michael Carroll, the husband and partner of White almost 30, said: “He was wise enough to be almost always nice. He was generally beyond exasperation and was generous. I continue to think of something to tell him before I remember.”
Born in Ohio in 1940, White grew up in Illinois. He was accepted in Harvard but rather chose to attend the University of Michigan in order to stay close to his therapist, who had assured White that he could “heal” homosexuality; A decision he would tackle in his novels. He then moved to New York, then to San Francisco, where he started a career as an independent writer and later magazine publisher.
His first novel in 1973, Forgetting Elena, was congratulated by Vladimir Nabokov as “a wonderful book”. He was followed in 1977 by the joy of gay sex, a pioneer sex manual wrote with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. “I think if I wrote it alone, it would have been called the tragedy of gay sex”, ” White joked the goalkeeper. “(Silverstein) brought the hot and cuddly part.”
During a large part of White’s career, he attracted his own life to write novels on gay men and sexual freedom. Undoubtedly his best known work, Boy’s Own Story in 1982, was the first of a trilogy that attracted his childhood life at the mature age, followed by The Beautiful Room is empty (1988) and The Aadwell Symphony (1997).
White lived in France between 1983 and 1990, where he became friends with Michel Foucault and developed an interest in French literature, writing admired biographies of Jean Genet – who won the White Un Pulitzer Prize – as well as Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.
During her career, White wrote more than 30 pounds. Some of his most notable novels understood the married man, who also attracted his life, and Fanny: a fiction, a historical novel on the author Frances Trollope and the social reformer Frances Wright.
He also published five Memoirs: My Lives in 2005; City Boy, about his life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, in 2009; In a pearl: my years in Paris, in 2014; The vice impruniAbout his tastes in literature in 2018; And The loves of my lifeAbout his prolific sex life, in 2025. White estimated that he slept with three men per week for 20 years; In the 1970s in New York, he wrote: “I thought it was completely normal to take a break in writing at two in the morning, to tell me the batteries and to have sex with 20 men in a truck. When I wrote that I had sex over the years with 3000 men, one of my contemporaries asked in a border way: `why so little? “” “.
White was HIV diagnosed in 1984. “I was not surprised, but I was very dark”, he said to the goalkeeper in January. “I sort of pulled the covers on my head and I thought:” Oh gee, I will be dead in a year or two “… it turned out that I was a slow progressive.”
White taught at Brown University and became a creative writing teacher at Princeton University.
Paul Baggaley, editor -in -chief of the White publisher, Bloomsbury, said that the author wrote: “Some of the best novels, biographies and memories the most courageous of the last fifty years, many of which will remain classics for future generations.”
He added: “It is impossible to overestimate the importance or influence of his writing, bringing the gay experience to the widest readership, and always made with mind, elegance and sexual franchise.”
