Edmund White on his Dark and Colorful Past
Edmund White, whose writings on the gay experience capture the joy and despair of life on society's fringe, has died, aged 85.
Photography by Ethan Hill/Getty Images
The novelist, memoirist, and biographer Edmund White, a singular witness and chronicler of gay life in the United States and Europe since the 1960s, has died, aged 85.
Born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, White participated in many of gay culture’s watershed moments, as a generation of gay men and women fought from the margins to enter the mainstream. Over the course of a long and prolific career, White wrote more than 30 books, from his memorable debut Forgetting Elena (1973) to The Loves of My Life, published earlier this year.
In the 1980s, White tested positive for HIV, but belonged “to a tiny percentage of ‘slow progressors,’ people whose T-cell count keeps dropping, but so slowly they seldom move into the danger zone,” he once wrote.
In 2018, Mastermind interviewed White by Skype in the sunlit apartment he was borrowing in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome. The connection was bad, and most of the time the video function was unavailable, but from time to time the image would resolve and the screen would light up with his infectious smile. Below is that conversation.
You have observed that the 1970s were ‘the last time that really high and low culture are separate’. You clearly have nostalgia for this period, but you also point out that few people would trade today’s culture for how dangerous and awful New York was.
EDMUND WHITE It’s true it was very dangerous. Even if you lived in Chelsea, if you took a taxi home you would make the driver wait until you were safely inside the front door because you could be mugged on the stoop.
Even though my generation complains about the Disneyfication of Times Square and the suburbanization of downtown, would you say it’s actually a better city?
EW The backdrop of New York is superior now because it’s safer, it’s cleaner, and it’s more gentrified. But if people are looking for inspiration in the sense of, let’s say, chance encounters, [that has been lost]. I mean, it used to be that everyone you knew lived in Manhattan and most of them below 14th St.
What year did you arrive in New York City?
EW I came from Chicago in 1962. When I arrived, the World’s Fair was just taking place, so the Mayor had decided to clean up the city, which meant closing all the gay bars. The only one that stayed open was Julius. But even in Julius you had to stand with your back to the bar facing out the windows, and you couldn’t be touching. You couldn’t be dancing with one other man, you could dance with a large group as long as there was one woman in the group, and guys would sit on ladders with flashlights and point them at you if you didn’t have a woman in your group.
You have written that gay people had to protect each other back then from street assaults.
EW They would wear whistles around their necks, so they could call each other.
“Nobody in their right mind knew how to defend gays. We were all going to therapists trying to go straight slowly.” Edmund White
That’s really quite an image. I guess I didn’t realize how dangerous it was.
EW That’s the backdrop, and then Stonewall happened in the summer of 69. The Stonewall was a bar that had been mainly white, but by 69 it was mainly black and Puerto Rican. The kids were called A-Trainers because they would come down on the A-Train from Harlem. They were kids who were used to fighting the cops anyways, for racial reasons. There was still a woman’s prison at the end of Christopher St., next door to the Jefferson Market, which has since been torn down. The women in it were mostly lesbians and their girlfriends would be down on the street below yelling, ‘Mabel, if you have sex with somebody else I’ll cut your fucking throat,’ you know, that kind of thing. So anyway, when they realized we had a gay riot on our hands, the girls all started cheering from their cells. I called it the first funny revolution. Because of the whole idea of ‘Black is Beautiful’ and ‘Gay is Good’. Nobody in their right mind knew how to defend gays. We were all going to therapists trying to go straight slowly. Gay couples were very unusual in that era. Maybe you knew two or three, four people who were coupled and they lived in Brooklyn Heights and they were trying to be respectable, but the rest of us were just trashy queens who would be running around having as much sex as possible.
And this became the first gay rebellion in history?
EW We told ourselves it probably wasn’t true. I think there had been other occasions like that on the West Coast, but we just didn’t know about them. A big black police wagon came and hauled off half of the staff and then the other half was locked inside waiting for the truck to come back, and that’s when we started. We pulled up parking meters and used them as battering rams and lit garbage cans full of paper on fire and threw them. There were lots and lots of drag queens there and they were an important part of the rebellion. I was just very bourgeois and wanting everybody to stop and go home.
What was the result of this insurrection?
EW I moved to Rome right after Stonewall and lived there for six months. By the time I got back, all these backroom bars and discos had opened and the police were no longer raiding everything. In fact, they were taking sensitivity lessons.
So that had an immediate impact.
EW Huge, and there were all the other organizations like the Gay Academic Union, which was a kind of intellectual group that was starting. Nobody had ever thought to research gay life before and suddenly it was very trendy. People were getting degrees in gender studies and all that.
You were diagnosed with HIV and have observed quite poignantly that, ‘Those of us who were [HIV] positive quickly developed an entirely new way of thinking about time, we wanted to act as if everything was normal so we could fully enjoy what was left of daily life.’
EW I think on the one hand you don’t want to dismiss everything normal and say, ‘I don’t want to waste my time going out to dinner with friends. If I’m going to be dead in two years I better be doing something important.’ Nothing is more important really than going out to dinner with your friends.
That’s the paradox.
EW You have to relax in a way. I mean, we all know that we are terminal cases, we will all be dead soon, but some sooner than others. Nevertheless, if you have AIDS or you’re HIV-positive, you have a special sense of urgency. This was the case especially of my friends in Paris. Hervé Guibert was a wonderful writer and he said that if he only had three years to live he wanted to write all the books that he would have written if he’d lived to be 80, even if he had to write them badly.
You’re from the Midwest but have spent considerable time living and traveling in France and Italy. What was your initial attraction to Europe?
EW I think I was the last generation that really took Europe seriously. In other words, most Americans your age probably think of it as Disneyland, but we still admired people like Sartre and Beauvoir and Jean Genet. Those were all our idols.
If you were a serious guy and had a serious education, you had to go to Europe at some point.
EW Now people go to Asia.
What was your childhood like?
EW I was fleeing my childhood. I was very unhappy. I went away to boarding school when I was 14 and I never lived at home after that. I would even stay at boarding school or university in the summer rather than go home. Anything rather than go home.
How old were you when your parents split?
EW Seven.
Does the memory of home shift over time? Do your memories soften, or do they stay the same?
EW Well, I don’t dwell on it, but I have a sister who is still alive, who is 82 or something, and she and I always talk about our horrible childhood.
Mainly stemming from your father?
EW Well, my mother was pretty crazy too. My mother was an alcoholic. My father raped my sister when she was 13 and got her pregnant.
Got her pregnant? Oh my god, that is tough.
EW It kind of armored me in order to survive. I had to be entirely self-reliant. I was smart and I had already written a novel by the time I was 15.
In addition to your many works of fiction, you are also known for your biographies of writers. What attracts you to these other people’s lives?
EW Well, you know, I’ve written like 27 books or something, and so many of them have been either autobiographical fiction or memoirs. I get sick of saying ‘I’ all the time and it’s more fun to explore other people’s lives, especially the three I have written about: Genet, Rimbaud, and Proust. All three are extremely different from each other. But all three were friends, all three were writers, and all three were gay. It seemed like varieties of gay experience.
“In memoir, the contract with the readers is the whole truth as best one recalls it, and the narrator can be as strange as he really is.” Edmund White
The ‘I-that-is-I’ and the ‘I-that-is-other’: What is the difference between the self who is writing autobiographical fiction and straight memoir?
EW In autobiographical fiction, because it’s fiction, the author can change the chronology, invent events, make himself more representative. In memoir, the contract with the readers is the whole truth as best one recalls it, and the narrator can be as strange as he really is. In my novel A Boy’s Own Story, I made the boy less precocious intellectually and sexually than I really was, hoping more readers could identify. In My Lives, a memoir, I wrote about ‘My Master’, an affair with a sadist.
And biography? What attracted you, to, say, Genet?
EW Well, my favorite editor, who has since died of AIDS, called me up from New York when I was already living in Paris and he said, ‘Do you know anyone who would write a biography of Genet?’ And I said, ‘Well, you mean there isn’t already one?’ He said, ‘No’, and Genet died in 1986. I think this was in 87, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll do it,’ thinking it would take me two or three years. It took me seven.
What was so complicated about it?
EW He was probably the most difficult subject you could possibly choose, because middle-class writers, who are 99 percent of all writers, have parents who save every scrap they write, all their friends are writers, and they exchange endless letters with them, and then everywhere you turn there is an article in the newspaper about it and all their friends are bourgeois people who keep diaries and so on. So, you can document a writer like that very easily. But Genet was a foundling. He had foster parents in the most obscure part of France and he never kept a diary. He never had middle-class friends. Most of his friends were criminals. And Genet was extremely cagey because he was writing books that were kind of like autobiographical fiction. I mean, they have titles like The Thief’s Journal or whatever, and so he didn’t want to have competing versions of his life. He was extremely opposed to a biography. He had made all his real friends pledge that they would never speak to a biographer, and so I had to undo all of that. I had to do all the original research, travel to Damascus, interview people in Japan, interview Black Panthers, and Palestinians.
So is that one of your most memorable projects then?
EW Oh, the most memorable.
What about Rimbaud? You’re attracted to gay literary outlaws?
EW I have my own theories about him, but I don’t even think he was gay, really. I mean, he had gay sex, but I think he was always the top and kind of, like, trade. He was young and hot and I think he would fuck anyone or anything.
And the subject of your third biography, Proust, who you have called, along with George Eliot, the most intelligent of writers — was that a walk in the park then?
EW I only did one tiny piece of research for Proust. I had lunch with the Princess de Caraman-Chimay, and she told me that her great grandfather was one of the models for the Duc de Guermantes and that one day, after Proust died, he came out to end the of the hallway in his palace and the butler was sobbing, and he said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And he said, ‘Because sir, Proust is dead.’ He said, ‘I didn’t know that you knew him,’ and he said, ‘Oh yes, whenever he would have a big party he would come by the next morning and ask me for the complete guest list and what everybody said, funny or not, and he would give me a huge tip.’ So that was my only original research.