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States of Desire: Travels in Gay America took readers to dozens of cities, from Memphis to Minneapolis, to chronicle the sexual freedom and political activism that was flourishing in the late 1970s. His other nonfiction has broken ground as well. White - an avowed Francophile - went on to write critically acclaimed biographies of French gay literary figures Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. The 730-page Genet: A Biography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. He studied French penal codes and conducted interviews with scores of people. His meticulously researched 1993 biography of Jean Genet, a vagabond who scribbled his novels on scraps of paper while in prison, took White eight years to complete. White’s literary contributions extend far beyond his fiction. She sent him to a Freudian psychiatrist in Evanston, Illinois, who declared him “unsalvageable.” The encounter freed him. “As novelists, we wanted to write about what it felt like to have it.”Īt 15, White told his mother, a child psychologist, that he was gay. “AIDS had been so medicalized,” White says. White says he has “never liked being political,” but after discovering he was HIV positive, he spoke out about his diagnosis and published some of the earliest gay fiction in English about AIDS, the 1987 collection The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis, written with Adam Mars-Jones. “His work is funny, sexy, passionate, and gorgeously written,” says Michael Cadden, a senior lecturer in theater at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts. His 1982 breakthrough novel, A Boy’s Own Story, set in the 1950s, depicts a teenage boy’s struggle to accept his sexuality: “I see now,” the narrator says, “that what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual.” The novel is the first installment - along with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony - in a celebrated trilogy of autobiographical works that capture gay life through the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic. We didn’t have to spell out what Fire Island was.” He and his peers in the gay writers group Violet Quill “had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. “Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for straight readers,” White told The New York Times last year. “Finally, I gave up and thought: I’ll write the novel I would want to read.” The New York Times reviewer called Forgetting Elena “an astonishing first novel” that was “uncannily beautiful.” “I was trying to write for the market,” he says.
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That creative work faced repeated rejections. A play he wrote in college was produced off-Broadway, and he got a job at Time magazine, working on plays and novels in the evenings. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he turned down a spot in a graduate program at Harvard to follow a boyfriend to New York City - one of many examples of his romantic life steering his destiny. She sent him to a Freudian psychiatrist in Evanston, Illinois, who declared him “unsalvageable.” The encounter freed him, he says, to chart his own course. “I’m sort of a mixture of a kind of rebel and a middle-class conformist,” he quips.Īt 15, he told his mother, a child psychologist, that he was gay. He even witnessed the Stonewall riots - though only because he happened to be walking down Christopher Street at 1 a.m. He has been HIV-positive since 1985, and was one of the first well-known figures to speak openly about the diagnosis. He co-founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an HIV/AIDS service organization, in 1982 and served as its first president. He has stood at the forefront of most of the significant milestones in gay life in the last half century.
His nonfiction also has been groundbreaking, from 1977’s The Joy of Gay Sex (written with his psychologist) to three well-regarded biographies of gay writers. In 11 subsequent novels and three memoirs, he has depicted gay life with elegant prose, lively wit, and disarming candor. With the 1973 publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, he emerged as one of the earliest - and most evocative - chroniclers of the inner lives of gay men. Photo: Ethan Hill/Contour by Getty ImagesĮdmund White, professor emeritus of creative writing at Princeton, has been called the godfather of gay American literature.