The death, today, of author Edmund White, aged 85, weirdly happens to coincide with my reading of the final chapter of his recently published last novel The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, an unabashed account of his relationships and dalliances with (he brazenly claims) over 3000 men.
Starkly frank, occasionally tender but more often rough and fleeting, many of these encounters are less romantic than raunchy. But White was a gay man who lived his life across the years when a love that dare not speak its name became one that could kill the one you love and beyond into the present age when for many (but certainly not all) the issue of sexual orientation is barely an issue at all.
White’s true literary legacy rests not on the curtain-call that is The Loves of My Life, but on his ground-breaking novel, A Boy’s Own Story (for my younger self a kind of apotheosis) and its candid, semi-autobiographical sequels, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. Other noted volumes include his first novel Forgetting Elena, City Boy, States of Desire, My Lives and his incisive biographies of fellow gay novelists, Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.
Edmund White unflinchingly spoke of his times to his times about living and loving, desiring and dying.
