Edmund White Quote

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. He later joined The Violet Quill, a gay writers' group instrumental in the development of contemporary LGBTQ literature.
During the 1980s United States AIDS epidemic, White 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.