Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature, has died at 85

Pioneering writer Edmund White has died. He was one of the most important authors of his era, whose work, including A Boy’s Own Story in 1982, made an indelible impression on gay culture and how LGBTQ experiences were more broadly understood during the dawning of the AIDS crisis and beyond. He was also one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, the long-running HIV/AIDS service organization in New York City.

White died Tuesday at his home in New York City of natural causes, according to his agent Bill Clegg. He was 85 years old.

“Ed was a groundbreaking writer whose candid depictions of gay life reshaped American literature. As a novelist, critic, memoirist and biographer, he expanded the boundaries of identity and desire on the page and in the culture,” Clegg shared in a statement. “He was also a wickedly funny, deeply generous, brilliant man who was beloved by many. He will be much missed.” 

Growing up in Evanston, Ill., White was sent to see psychologists by his mother, who was a child psychologist herself.

“It was because I was gay,” he told WHYY’s Fresh Air in 2006. “On the one hand, I was lusting after boys my own age and even older men. And that’s what I really wanted, and I was obsessed with that idea of having some sort of sex with older people. But, on the other hand, I knew that it was a bad thing. And I also knew that it would limit me as a writer because that was very much the idea in the air that a writer could only be successful if he could touch on universal topics.”

White attended the University of Michigan, where he studied Chinese, and ended up following a boyfriend to New York, where he was present, he told NPR, for the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

“I was actually just walking by with a friend, and we saw the disturbance. And then pretty soon, we had mixed in with the melee,” he told Scott Simon on Weekend Edition in 2022.

“And then all of a sudden, the police raided the bar. So we resisted. Everybody remembers it as being terribly solemn because it was sort of like our Bastille Day. But the truth is, everybody was laughing. And even saying slogans like ‘gay is good,’ which was meant to echo ‘Black is beautiful,’ struck us as funny because we’d been so oppressed for so long that the idea of claiming our rights seemed vaguely humorous to us.”

White became an editor for mainstream publications: Time-Life Books, Newsweek, and the Saturday Review. He published his first novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973.

But White will be primarily remembered for a series of autobiographical novels that broke ground in gay representation. They include A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, from 1988, and The Farewell Symphony, from 1997. He was part of an early generation of openly gay writers that also included Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer and Felice Picano.

“They were the first people to come out publicly and to risk their careers doing it,” editor Michael Denneny, a lauded editor and LGBTQ activist, told Fresh Air in 1987. Denneny was an early champion of White’s work.

White wrote more than 30 novels over the course of his career.