埃德蒙·怀特

Edmund Valentine White III (January 13, 1940 – June 3, 2025) was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and essayist. A pioneering figure in LGBTQ and especially gay literature after the Stonewall riots, he wrote with rare candor about gay identity, relationships, and sex. His work emerged as part of an increasingly solidified and visible LGBTQ community, helping to reshape public narratives at a time when coming out was still a dangerous, even radical act. His writing, noted for intimate depth and literary elegance, includes the semi-autobiographical trilogy A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997). He also co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), promoting sex-positive discourse.

Born in Cincinnati and raised outside Chicago, White studied Chinese at the University of Michigan after initially declining admission to Harvard University in order to adhere to conversion therapy. He later declined Harvard again to follow a lover to New York City, where he worked at Time Life and launched his literary career. His debut, Forgetting Elena (1973), was praised by Vladimir Nabokov. White joined The Violet Quill, a gay writers' group instrumental in the development of contemporary LGBTQ literature, in 1980.

During the 1980s United States AIDS epidemic, he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis and wove themes of illness and resilience into his writing. He spent many of these years in France, forming intellectual and social ties with figures like Michel Foucault. Among the first public figures to speak openly about his HIV-positive status when diagnosed, White remained healthy as a long-term nonprogressor to AIDS. He began a lasting open relationship with his husband, writer Michael Carroll, whom he married in 2013. White became a professor in the 1990s, teaching writing at universities like Brown and Princeton.

Described as the "first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers" and the "patron saint of queer literature", White received numerous honors, including the Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He also wrote biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, plus memoirs My Lives (2005) and City Boy (2009). France made him Chevalier (1993) and later Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Early life and education

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati on January 13, 1940. He was the son of Delilah "Lila Mae" and Edmund White, II, a civil engineer and entrepreneur.

He was raised in Cincinnati and Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his childhood in the Chicago area. Beginning in the middle of his second year of high school, he attended Cranbrook School in Michigan.

At Cranbrook, he was an honors student and penned two novels, one his first gay novel, and the other a story about a divorced woman that began as a writing assignment for a creative writing class. He graduated from Cranbrook in 1958.

As he recounted in his novel The Beautiful Room Is Empty, White was accepted to Harvard, but chose to stay near his therapist at home, who had assured White he could "cure" his homosexuality through conversion therapy. He majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan.

White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York City. There, he freelanced for Newsweek, and spent seven years working as a staffer at Time-Life Books. After briefly relocating to Rome, San Francisco, and then returning to New York, he was briefly employed as an editor for the Saturday Review when the magazine was based in San Francisco in the early 1970s; after the magazine folded in 1973, White returned to New York to edit Horizon (a quarterly cultural journal) and freelance as a writer and editor for entities such as Time-Life and The New Republic.

Literary career

Early career

White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titled Mrs Morrigan.

White's debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner. The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book".

Written with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership. It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone.

His next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life.

From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group, The Violet Quill, which met briefly during that period, and included Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. White's autobiographic works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.

In 1980, White brought out States of Desire, a survey of some aspects of gay life in America. In 1982, he helped found the group Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. In the same year appeared White's best-known work, A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographic-fiction series, continuing with The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997), which describes stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in the latter novel are recognizably based on well-known people from White's New York-centered literary and artistic milieu.

Life in France

From 1983 to 1990, White lived in France. He moved there initially for one year in 1983 via the Guggenheim Fellowship for writing he had received, but took such a liking to Paris ("with its drizzle, as cool, grey and luxurious as chinchilla" as described in his autobiographical novel The Farewell Symphony) that he stayed there for longer. French philosopher Michel Foucault invited him for dinner several times, dismissing White's concerns about HIV/AIDS as puritanical. They attended the Paris Opera together, including a Regietheater production of an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, before Foucault died of the illness in 1984.