What Edmund White gave us
Edmund White in 1988. (Fairfax Media Archives / Getty)
Ira Silverberg on the writer who made gay life feel both mythic and mundane, whose books changed everything—and whose stories, in and out of bed, never stopped shocking and delighting.
By Ira Silverberg
Originally published in Document Journal.
Edmund White, who died on June 3, 2025 at 85, was the type of Gay man who hardly exists anymore. He was the charming, gregarious Midwesterner turned internationally famous, quintessentially cosmopolitan writer. He was both modest and ambitious about his career. He remembered a lot, having been sober for many of his years, and could go from deliciously tawdry to deeply serious in a New York minute. His long marriage to writer Michael Carroll was an open relationship. He lived with HIV/AIDS for decades bringing hope, perhaps unwittingly, to many who had felt its ravages. His dichotomies would baffle the class of doctrinaire, heteronormative Gay men for whom nuance doesn’t exist. And he wrote books, a lot of them. One of the earliest had a profound impact on me when I read it as a seventeen-year-old high school senior in 1980.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples was handed to me at Hurrah, a nightclub on West 62nd Street, by co-doorman Aleph Ashline. He could have been the model for Mel Odom’s jacket art—a dreamy blond angel on the nod, cigarette hanging from his lips, night sky ablaze with stars. The other doorman, Haoui Montaug, had been my boyfriend for a while. They were both early guides in my Gay cultural upbringing.
Nocturnes was a foundational text for me, an evocation of an aspect of Gay New York life that lurked nearby; a blueprint of what could/would come; and a lush, dreamy, romantic, elegy. It will always be my favorite of Ed’s books. He moved on to a more accessible style, and with A Boy’s Own Story in 1982, a classic coming-of-age novel. It validated the existence, and pain, that Gay men faced in the great reckoning of self-acceptance. It is one of the most important Gay novels ever to have been published.
I read A Boy’s Own Story when I was living in Lawrence, Kansas as part of a Queer family. William Burroughs was the pater familias. James Grauerholz, his adopted son, was my lover. Bill Whitehead, Ed’s editor, sent a copy to William. He read it and passed it to James who did the same with me. Each of us came of age in vastly different backgrounds, classes, and geographies, at different times. A Boy’s Own Story was the great equalizer, touching each heart with a sense of recognition as no novel had before.
The impact of that novel was felt worldwide. He humanized something that was still unspeakable in most families; gave voice to a community who was, then unknowingly, on the verge of being decimated by a plague that would forever change us; and became a standard bearer who opened the door for all kinds of Gay writers. Ed chronicled our lives with elegance, wit, and the appropriate sorrow, then with his fin de siècle The Farewell Symphony—the third book in a trilogy that opened with A Boy’s Own Story, then The Beautiful Room is Empty (which some called “The Beautiful Book is Empty,” as he loved his flourishes, sometimes a bit too much)—he opened the doors to the new century.
He continued with novels, a major biography of Jean Genet, and wrote even more about sex, his own, in fabulous, lurid detail, tallying up 3,000 sexual encounters in this year’s The Loves of my Life.
In the late ’90s, he joined a dinner I hosted for Lynne Tillman, a dear mutual friend, following a reading she gave at the Fales Library at NYU. Earlier that day, as Ed told my guests—a group, mostly writers, mostly straight—he was fucked by an Estonian hustler who “banged the shit out of me for hours with this fabulous, massive uncut cock. And he was cute too.” One writer’s wife, a seemingly proper, upper-class Brit, wore that pinched nose look of Dame Maggie in Downton Abbey. Ed went on for a bit and when the woman’s face was on the verge of twitching, I brought out that copy of Nocturnes and told him the story of Aleph handing it to me. He smiled, signed it and pivoted. When I pulled it out yesterday, tears welled up in my eyes. Tears of gratitude for Ed, and how lucky we were to have had him amongst us, Estonian hustler, and all.