Edmund White’s Unerring Influence on Queer Writing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/t-magazine/edmund-white-queer-writing-book-influence.html

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There’s a famous anecdote that finds the author and queer icon Gore Vidal in elegant decay, dining in a London restaurant with the book editor Jonathan Burnham. While groping for more wine, Vidal accidentally pours himself a large glass of olive oil; he takes a swig and, after much spluttering, whirls on Burnham. “You saw me do that and you didn’t stop me,” he says. “You want me to die so that your Edmund White can be King Fag!”

Vidal’s medieval conception of queer literature — a paucity of thrones, with deadly usurpers huddled in every bush — suggests where we were in the 1980s. With the notable exception of Christopher Isherwood, there were few benevolent eldergays in the literary scene. James Baldwin was ailing, Tennessee Williams was on a strict diet of goofballs, and Vidal had paranoid delusions of oil-based assassination. In 1980, when a barefoot Truman Capote met White in New York City, he carried a pink palmetto fan and a warning: “You’ll probably write some good books. But remember, it’s a horrible life.”

“It hasn’t been for me, I don’t think,” White says now. He’s being modest. At 29, White sent a gossipy letter to friends about his night at the Stonewall riots, later published in the 2008 compendium “Letters of the Century”; at the height of the hedonistic 1970s, he co-wrote “The Joy of Gay Sex”; in 1982, he published the seminal coming-out novel “A Boy’s Own Story,” and helped found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. White was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1985, but his improbable Maccabee survival — as a “slow progresser,” his viral load remained low for decades — hasn’t quite resulted in his coronation. Instead, he’s become something far more interesting: the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers. Having recently retired after 19 years teaching at Princeton (his former students include the novelist Andrew Sean Greer and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins), White remains a devoted mentor, an indefatigable blurbist and a SilverDaddies.com mainstay who sometimes slips promising galleys to his twentysomething hookups. (“I’m actually quitting the site now,” he says.)

At 78, White can’t resist looking, and his latest essay collection, “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading,” finds him in high voyeur mode. Richard Wagner, he reports, drooled while composing his manuscripts, and F. Scott Fitzgerald “liked to dress up for the page” in hopes of leaving an impression. Sometimes White seems to be peering over the bathroom stall, ogling writers in the primal act of creation — and, as he admits, he’s “always associated reading and writing with sex.”

Earlier this month, I visited White in his Chelsea apartment. Half-read books about saints (research for his next novel, “A Saint in Texas”) were splayed on the furniture, and he was fretting over the state of disgraced schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau’s marriage. “It was like a Romeo and Juliet story,” he says of the 1990s tabloid scandal in which she slept with one of her students. “You know: impossible love that triumphs over everything.” When I mentioned that Letourneau seemed to have reconciled with her child groom, White beamed, as if he’d brought it about himself. I had visions of little Dinah Lord from “The Philadelphia Story,” crowing “I did it all!” at her sister’s wedding. This probably isn’t the sort of reference White would catch, or even care to notice; the closest he gets to acknowledging pop culture in “The Unpunished Vice” is a brief reverie on “The Pillow Book,” a Japanese romance novel from the 11th century.

While he is gratified to see queer narratives going mainstream, White clearly laments the days when reading literature was the only way to pry loose the secrets of gay life. “To my earliest and most loyal readers, I had the honor of being an indispensable writer,” he said in a speech in June, while accepting Lambda Literary’s Visionary Award. I own a secondhand copy of his 1988 novel “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” that was passed from gay man to gay man during White’s heyday, and their annotations feel as elemental and histrionic as claw marks. One wrote “not not not not” in the margins whenever a paragraph didn’t reflect his own coming-out narrative and “yes yes yes yes” whenever it did. On another page, he wrote the name “Todd” over and over. Can any queer adult today read with this kind of mad projective hunger?

White is alive to drifts in his readership, and “The Unpunished Vice” finds him fatalistic about the future of literature. He confesses, disarmingly, that he's “not sure what readers want.” His solution, for the last 45 years, has been to give them an endless travelogue of contradictory selves. The man who titled his first memoir “My Lives” has led dozens of them: babe in the woods, sex god, thief-biographer, critic, giggling Stonewall correspondent, AIDS elegist, and on and on. So, here, we asked eleven queer writers to discuss their favorite incarnation of Edmund White, and share what they found — and still find — in his pages.

At the Barnes & Noble in Jonesboro, Ark., I used to stare at “A Boy’s Own Story” for hours, afraid to pick it up. Sometimes I found the nerve to read it in small chunks, but like many queer kids I’d always take it to a different section of the store first. I didn’t know what tradition White was writing in; I simply knew that his prose was electric and beautiful and I wanted more of it. I never bought the book. Growing up in the Baptist church, I honestly believed that the feelings books like White’s inspired could lead to literal demon possession. I’m sure I thought White was demonically possessed. And he is — but in a wonderful way! He’s a fabulous demon. For all its frank exploration of sexuality, the most profound sentiment in “A Boy’s Own Story” is a particular kind of innocence. That book captures the universality of first love, that moment when you completely dissolve into another self.

I first encountered White through his biography of the French author Jean Genet. I was still in the closet, and I think I wore out the index page with the entry on “Genet, Homosexuality of.” White was accounting for an adult and appetitive world I didn’t understand yet, a time when gay men had significantly fewer rights, but found power in claiming the margins rather than being resigned to them. At this intersection of White and Genet, it seemed possible that one could reside both in the gutter and the academy at the same time. I thought: If I don’t have the courage to live like this, I can at least try to write like this.

When I moved to Paris and started to live life as a gay man, my friends told me, “You can’t be gay without reading Bernard-Marie Koltès, Jean Genet, James Baldwin and Edmund White.” In France, White’s books are not just considered important on a literary level — they’re also a fundamental step in the construction of the gay self. His memoir “My Lives” was particularly formative for me in that sense.

I must have read White’s story “Running on Empty” when I was 17 or 18, and there’s a moment in it I’ve never forgotten. An H.I.V.-positive man, a translator, has returned to the United States after years living in Paris. Staying with a cousin in Texas, he’s surrounded by the world he fled, and increasingly frightened that his illness might trap him there, undoing a hard-won liberation. (“Tears of humiliation: he was offended that a virus had been permitted to win an argument.”) Walking through a cemetery with his cousin one afternoon he sees a beautiful young man urinating beneath a tree; that night, alone, he returns to what he thinks is the spot. And this is the moment I’ve never been able to forget: he kneels down to touch the dirt, he imagines he feels moisture, he lifts his hand to his lips. That gesture crystallizes a quality that I think of as White’s signature, and as an ideal of art: it’s elegant, refined, ceremonious; it’s also a complete surrender to the abjection of desire. Like other moments in White’s work, it has been a kind of lodestar for me, an orientation in queer art-making.

White is the most generous conversationalist and a stylist with considerable reach, but in his memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris,” I felt his generosity differently. There is a candor and an asperity to the book that I enjoyed, a self-mocking manner that lets us in on the joke of him being an American finding his way in a city that speaks in social class perhaps more than it does in French. He also lets us in on what he learned from trying to survive as a writer while simultaneously surviving being a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I don’t think it was meant as a how-to book, but the sharp bursts of insight throughout explained so much to me that it became consoling, almost a torch in the dark.

I first encountered White’s work as an undergraduate; the book was “City Boy,” and he had me at hello. I was hooked by the charm and wit of his voice, but it was his falcon’s eye for detail and the sharp (often hilarious) dialogue that seduced me. And, my god, the book is so unabashedly queer. He was so frank about his many lovers and cruising rituals and gay bars and glory holes. He didn’t have to fit into the straight mold of writing about marriage, divorce and children. Now that I’ve published my own (very queer) novel, I keep coming back to one passage in particular: “But if I’d been straight,” he writes, “I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.” These words sear into me.

All of White’s books have felt edifying, but it’s his elegiac AIDS chronicle, “The Farewell Symphony,” that confirmed to me what kind of writer I had to be. In its pages, baroque passages on the nobility of bottoming and the scent of sex collide democratically, mischievously, with appreciations of Proust and Haydn. White urges us to live honestly, to remain friends, to exile ourselves, to walk the streets in agony and to let ourselves be loved. But above all, no other writer makes the case so convincingly that our hearts are palimpsests: each former lover etched over the next, each heartbeat an echo of a distant love, who now wanders the streets without us.

In “Our Young Man,” White writes, “Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.” This line captures something essential about life, and something completely inaccessible to me right now. There have been moments when I’ve wished I was retired; I’m chasing, I guess, a certain feeling of tranquillity and calm, a sense I get when I look at the elderly. White’s quote got me thinking that maybe the serenity I see is the chaos I can’t see, the emotional mayhem life puts us through.

When I think of White, I picture him in the period when he was living with the beautiful young theater actor Keith McDermott and pining for him and listening to McDermott having loud sex with 1950s movie heartthrob Tab Hunter. Somehow this story, revealed in White’s memoir “My Lives,” blends juicy gossip and romantic yearning, and it has stayed with me maybe because White is the observer here, the one outside of the action, when he has so often been in the middle of it.

White is justly celebrated for the unblinkingly honest truth-telling in the three volumes of his autobiography, “My Lives,” “City Boy” and “Inside a Pearl,” but it’s the third volume, about his time in Paris, that holds a special place in my heart. It has his trademark seeming — I want to underline the word “seeming” — ease of style, and effortlessness of telling, as if he had an infinite fountain of stories in him. But beyond that lightness, so full of art, there is a profoundly cosmopolitan sensibility that sees through everything, especially the way different cultures diverge and collide and face off. He is witty, funny, naughty, entertaining and you can see his eyes twinkling with both delight and wisdom as you read the dispatches from this true citizen of the world.

White wasn’t the first queer author I’d read, nor even the first whose literary sex scenes offered one-handed reading. He was, however, the first whose fiction showed me how desire shapes a queer life. In “A Boy’s Own Story,” the narrator’s longing for men is not incidental to his character but formative; his sexuality creates him, and he sees how it creates others like him: “He was alone with his erection, which I could see through the thin fabric of his summer pants. It was something he carried around with him wherever he went, like a scar.” This clandestine yearning may seem quaint for readers who see gay marriage as homophobia’s final defeat, but sanitization has always been oppression’s quieter path. Recently, an acquaintance of mine came out on Facebook. Most of his friends and family recited some variation of, “Your sexual orientation doesn’t matter to me.” Ever the homophobic fantasy, his queerness was accepted only as a neutered personality trait. But White’s characters don’t just “happen to be queer”: their sexuality is as crucial to them as mine is to me. There’s nothing in his writing that shies away from celebrating this, nor should there be.

This article has been updated.