Transcript

Remembering writer Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature | Fresh Air

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· 38 min · 6,537 words · 43 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Remembering writer Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature | Fresh Air", an episode of Fresh Air published June 20, 2025 (38 min, about 6,537 words). It mentions 8 people, works and ideas, including Edmund White, Stonewall Rebellion, Gay Liberation, My Lives, A Streetcar Named Desire.

What this episode is about

The piece honors the life and contributions of Edmund White, an influential figure in gay literature who passed away at age 85. It highlights his groundbreaking works, particularly "A Boy's Own Story," and explores the challenges he faced in the publishing industry due to his sexual orientation, as well as the impact of the gay liberation movement on his career.

Key takeaways

  • Edmund White turned rejection into revolution, crafting gay narratives that transformed literature after Stonewall.
  • The Joy of Gay Sex brilliantly merged sexuality with real-life struggles, redefining what a handbook could be.
  • Coming out professionally liberated White; authenticity fueled his creativity and confidence, opening literary doors.
  • White revealed the irony: gay writers often faced hurdles from editors grappling with their own identities.
  • In a world chasing conquests, White found beauty in devotion, showcasing the complexities of love's pursuit.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Edmund White, Gay Liberation, Stonewall Rebellion, A Streetcar Named Desire
  2. – 10:00: Edmund White
  3. – 15:00: Brown University, Vanity Fair
  4. – 25:00: Edmund White
  5. – 30:00: My Lives, Edmund White
  6. – 37:57: Edmund White

Notable quotes from "Remembering writer Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature | Fresh Air"

  • Non-fiction, collections of essays, a national book award-winning biography of French author John Jane, and the guide, The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-authored. We're going to listen back to portions of four of his interviews.
    about John Jane · at
  • Would think they were gay if they came out in favor of my book. So, it wasn't until after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, the beginning of gay liberation, well after that I…
    about Stonewall Rebellion · at
  • Professionally that way I think was very liberating. I then went on to write states of desire which is my travel book about the United States and I think there's a kind of…
    about A Streetcar Named Desire · at
  • I was an unusually conservative and backward person. Terry Gross speaking with Edmund White in 1985.
    about Edmund White · at
  • Married when I met him and he gave up his wife, his language, his country, his job to come with me when I was coming to Providence to teach at Brown University in 1990. And so…
    about Brown University · at
  • I want to read an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 1983 that was originally published in Vanity Fair called Sexual Culture. And you were writing, No homosexual can take his homosexuality for granted. He must sound it, palpate.
    about Vanity Fair · at
  • Writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund White again in 2006, he had written the autobiography My Lives. They started with a…
    about My Lives · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Edmund White — Person · Primary subject (featured interviewee in archival clips) · 7 mentions · first at
    The episode is a retrospective built around multiple Fresh Air interviews with writer Edmund White, discussing his life, work, and gay culture.
  • John Jane — Person · Referenced author/biographical subject (likely mis-transcribed) · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the subject of a National Book Award-winning biography attributed to White; however, the name appears inconsistent with known facts and is likely a transcript error.

Books & papers

Concepts & topics

  • Gay Liberation — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
    Rejected, partly maybe because they weren't any good. Although years later after Gay Liberation, I would meet gay editors who had been in the closet and working for major…

Places & events

Media & podcasts

Full transcript with timestamps

This is Fresh Air. I'm David B.I. Edmund White, one of the most eloquent and perceptive chronicers of gay life and culture, died earlier this month on June 3rd. He was 85. As a boy in the 1950s in the Midwest, he tried to cure his homosexuality. He drew upon that time of life for his 1982 book, A Boy's Own Story. It became an international bestseller and the first of a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels. When the book was republished nine years ago, Alan Haulinghurst in the Guardian described the book as quote, "Both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness." unquote. White wrote more than 30 books, including non-fiction, collections of essays, a national book award-winning biography of French author John Jane, and the guide, The Joy of Gay Sex, which he

co-authored. We're going to listen back to portions of four of his interviews. Please be advised, there is some talk of sex, but nothing explicit. We'll begin with Terry's 1985 interview with Edmund White. when you were first starting to write and first trying to get published, um do you think that that being gay was an obstacle at all? Oh, very much so. I uh have always written about gay themes from the time I wrote my first novel when I was 14 years old. Uh and by the time I got into my 20s, I was writing um novels with gay themes that were always rejected, partly maybe because they weren't any good. Although years later after Gay Liberation, I would meet gay editors who had been in the closet and working for major publishers who told me that they had read my book and liked it, but they had been afraid to recommend it because they were afraid that people would think they were gay if they came

out in favor of my book. So, it wasn't until after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, the beginning of gay liberation, well after that that I began to get published. And even so, the first book that was published, Forgetting Elena, is only gay by virtue of participating in this mysterious thing called The Gay Sensibility. There are no explicit gay scenes in it. After your first or second novel, you co-wrote the book, The Joy of Gay Sex. And I wonder what effect that had on your literary career. And one, because it was a self-helporiented book about sexuality, two because it was definitely a gay book. Um, and you were a novelist, best known as as a novelist until then. I think that it had um it didn't pigeon hole me as a sort of self-help writer amongst gay people because what the interesting thing is if you compare the joy of sex with the joy of gay sex you see that whereas almost all of the joy of sex for heterosexuals

is about um sexual positions. The joy of gay sex about 40% of the book is devoted to lifestyle questions like coming out with your parents uh uh sex and religion uh how to write a will with your beloved that you live with who isn't that has no legal status in your life and so on. So I think gay people understood that this was a sort of handbook about being gay and that it dealt with coming out issues as much as it dealt with sexual positions. In fact, I think that Masters and Johnson demonstrated a long time ago that lesbians and gay men have a great deal fewer questions about their partners than heterosexual partners do because after all, one's dealing with a member of the same sex. So you understand to some degree the anatomy and the physiology of the body that you're in bed with. Uh uh there are fewer mysteries. You're not dealing with the opposite. You're dealing with the same. So I think that that what people

were looking for in that book was uh was reassurance uh and guidance in terms of lifestyle rather than sexuality. Was that book a dramatic coming out of sorts for you because there was no way to you know keep that you were gay in the closet at all even you know even if you wanted to for one manuscript that you were submitting. It was definitely a big coming out for me but it was very very liberating to me personally. Uh I think that my life took a a turn toward being much happier after I wrote that book because I think for the first time I really was out. I thought that I had come out years before by telling a few friends but uh having come out professionally that way I think was very liberating. I then went on to write uh states of desire which is my travel book about the United States and I think there's a kind of exuberance about that book a kind of confidence which I had never really had in my writing before

and I think it's a real result of this new sense of security that I had a new sense of of of having consolidated my own identity. How much of a period did you go through of of feeling very insecure about being gay? I mean, did you ever go so far as to like try to, you know, convert, so to speak? Oh, absolutely. I was endlessly going out with uh women throughout my 20s and I was in psychoanalysis for 12 years and I was, I think, an unusually slow learner. I mean, I was an unusually conservative and backward person. Terry Gross speaking with Edmund White in 1985.

Next, let's listen to a portion of Terry's 1994 interview with him. It began with him reading from a story called Watermarked about first love. It was from his collection of short stories called Skinned Alive. There is some talk of sex, but nothing explicit. Our love worked well because Randall was the one man in a thousand who welcomed devotion and who, like a medieval princess, believed in it only after it had been proved by many deeds and long trials. Most men like chasing after rather than being the quarry, and flee someone too obviously in love. Being adored suffocates and gives them too little imaginative scope. Only someone unobtainable leaves enough room for dreams, inspires longing, promotes scheming, and implies arrival. Whereas a quick and total conquest is the last act that abrogates all need for the preceding drama. But Randall had had enough strife at home and wanted to be

cherished. I so enjoyed serving him and supporting him and listening to him that I forgot my own existence, certainly my own uninteresting face. If I would glance at my own reflection after a long evening spent with him, I'd be offended by the reminder that such sustained communion hadn't improved my looks. I learned what a burden beauty can be. Drunk men at parties would take an instant dislike to Randall. Eventually, I figured out their reasoning. I want him. He thinks he's too good for me. The bastard. He didn't want to be liked merely for his looks, but he needed to maintain them just in case. You know, I I was thinking reading this story about about a first love about whether you know when you're talking about looks and what you know, whether men like to be the pursuer or the pursued. I was thinking if those kinds of things are much different when the relationship is is gay than it is

from when it's straight. You know, I was identifying with you, right? Well, I think that I mean, some people say that the burden of being a gay man is that you're supposed to be as successful as a man and as beautiful as a woman. I mean, in other words, you have to play both roles and or ideally you're expected to. And I think a lot of gay men feel under tremendous pressure to be both successful and attractive. And it's awfully hard to be either one, but certainly to be both is is rare. You know, in the beginning of this story, you write about um about learning to be gay, learning certain behaviors, learning to dish, right, and then teaching it to others. Were there aspects of gay culture that you felt you actually learned? Oh, for sure. I mean, I think that uh, you know, there's a difference between being homosexual and being gay. I mean, I think homosexual is simply a question of desire for a

certain kind of sexual encounter with members of your own sex. But being gay implies a whole culture, a whole way of acting, of thinking and and it changes, of course, from decade to decade. In um in the case of this story, I talk about someone who's coming out in the late 1950s and who's learning from Chicago street queens how to camp and how to dish and how to uh uh I mean it's the sort of thing that I guess we know about now from drag queens, but that then in those days was was more uh generally uh acceptable in gay society.

As you've gotten older, how has your idea of the ideal companion changed? Well, I think that um I now prize real intimacy more than I did before. Perhaps I didn't even know what it was. I mean, I lost my lover to AIDS um this last March. And uh his name was Uber. He was French. I was with him for five years. And I think that in my own case, I was always afraid of intimacy with people. But when you live with someone, I mean, the last four of the five years that we were together, we knew that he uh had AIDS and didn't have long to live. And when you know, when you're living with somebody that you know is is not going to live very long, you give up all your fears about guarding your independence, uh, and you just give yourself completely to somebody just as I feel that he gave himself to me. I mean, he had been married when I met him and he gave up his wife, his language, his country, his job to come with me when I was uh coming

to Providence to teach at Brown University in 1990. And so I felt like he had made a total gift of himself to me and that's what I wanted to be able to give to him. But I think before that I had never really understood uh that kind of gift. I mean, I hear people today talk about uh codependency as though it's a bad thing, but I think in fact that's what love is. Love is codependency. It's perfectly okay to be codependent. In your new collection of essays, The Burning Library, you write about um the first time you saw one of the backroom bars of Greenwich Village in 1970. And this was shortly after uh you got back to the village after living in Rome for close to a year. What was your reaction when you first saw that?

I thought it was uh a little bit scary but also terrific. I mean it seemed to me that I mean now that because of AIDS we all tend to act as though there was something abnormal and distressing and and inevitably sinful about that period of promiscuity. And even the word promiscuity of course is one that is loaded against the people who practice it. But I think that uh I think it was Susan Santag once who said that there was only a very brief period for both men and women, both gays and straits when uh they weren't um when they were able to be sexually free. And basically it's something that started with the sexual freedom started with the invention of antibiotics and later the birth control pill and ended with AIDS.

So in other words, let's say there's a period of 15 or 20 years when in all of human history when people had all the necessary conditions which include the anonymity of living in a big city, the breakdown of traditional religion, the uh freedom from veneerial disease, the freedom from uh uh becoming pregnant through sex. when people could actually practice sex as a form of self-expression, as a form of art, as a form of uh of um pleasure rather than as a form of economic exchange or or all the other things that sex has been harnessed into serving.

I want to read an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 1983 that was originally published in Vanity Fair called Sexual Culture. And um you were writing, "No homosexual can take his homosexuality for granted. He must sound it, palpate it. For that reason, all homosexuals are quote gay philosophers and that they must invent themselves. And then you wrote, on the other hand, no straight man stands in wrapped contemplation of his straightness unless he's an ass. And uh so um I guess you know like so much of your life has been given over to to writing about being gay both in your essays in your autobiographies in your fiction. Um, you know, I have the strange feeling that that writing itself is somehow linked to homosexuality. And I haven't worked this out, so I won't be able to make any sense of it, but I think it's really very odd if you think of it that now Time magazine tells us this week that only one and a half% of

people are gay. So, if that's true, think how very very few homosexuals there actually are. And yet if you look at at the at at the famous writers of this century um I mean a huge high proportion of them are gay. And it seems to me that there is something that about writing itself which is a way of at once participating in society but also looking at it from an enormous distance of at once uh imitating the conventions of society while having a very jaundice eye toward them. It seems to me that that that spirit which animates the work of of homosexual writers like uh P for instance or Jed or or or or Jane Jean Jane um uh it seems to me that that there is something fundamental. I mean in other words something about being gay means that you pass or can pass as an ordinary member of society and yet you always feel different. You always feel that you're of this other race. So it's a bit I suppose like a black person who

looks white or a Jew who doesn't look Jewish who who who is passing as a gentile or as a white person or or in the case of a homosexual as a heterosexual. In other words, you're a kind of double agent and you're living uh a different kind of life from the one you feel inside. So you think part of the reason why you became a writer was the sense of being the double agent? Definitely. I think the very ear when I first began writing it was it was like a a kind of desperate attempt to fight off um the waves of self-hatred and guilt that I think were really threatening my sanity. I mean when I was 14 or 15 years old a psychiatrist told my mother that I should be put in a mental hospital and they should just throw the key away that I was unsalvageable.

And um I certainly uh was I think right on the edge of a of of mental collapse. And the one thing that saved me was writing. And uh I went to a boarding school and I would do all my homework in the afternoon so that at night during study hall all I would have to do for those two hours was work on my novel. So I had already finished a novel by the time I was 15, another one by the time I was 17. And I didn't write in a kind of arty way. I was writing out of a real desperate need to um make sense of the world to fight off this madness. Let me just backtrack for a second here. I think I know what you mean, but why would a straight person who stands in wrapped contemplation of his heterosexuality being asked? Well, it' be like be like a white person sort of looking at his own body and saying, "Oh, aren't I beautiful? I'm all white." I mean, you would just say, "What a nitwit," you know? uh whereas a black

person who says black is beautiful. You can understand that because since the dominant society uh of did at least until 20 or 30 years ago find um the state of being black inferior and little black girls back in those days used to buy white dolls. Uh to say black is beautiful was a revolutionary statement. To say white is beautiful is idiotic. So it's it's about contemplating your difference. Yeah. I mean in other words I think If if if you're coming from a persecuted minority, you need to redefine yourself not in the terms of the dominant society but in in your own terms in new terms that will empower you or infranchise you. Whereas if you are already a member of the dominant society to simply glory in being dominant I is is uh fatuous.

In one of your essays, you write that although at at some point in your career, you started writing for what you perceived as a sophisticated gay reader, earlier on as a writer, you saw your audience as an older European heterosexual woman. Yes. Well, who was this idealized reader? And and why? Well, I think it was Mrs. Nabokov. and uh because and she actually would read my writing. And when I finally met her, I finally met her years later after her husband had died at I went to the Montre Palace Hotel in Switzerland and met her and she was already quite deaf and she did that thing that deaf people oftenimes do of just doing all the talking because that way they don't have to hear what you have to say. But I didn't mind because she also did the thing that every writer dreams of another person doing. She recite recited uh pages of my first novel, Forgetting Elena, by heart because she in fact had

an um she had a a photographic memory and she could just summon up whole pages of one's pros and recite them and to have the the the woman to whom Nabokov dedicated every one of his novels and the muse of the greatest writer of the century recite to you whole pages of your own work was of course the most delicious thrill imaginable. So, but but long before that, before I ever knew her, but when I knew that in fact she was reading my writing because she would write me notes about it, um I I I did have her as a kind of ideal reader and not just because I admired her husband and and her and them as a couple, but uh also because um it seemed to me like a a filter to make sure that I mean, one of the things that I sometimes don't like about contemporary gay writing is that I feel that it makes a lot of inside references that make it accessible only to other gay people. And one of the things I

wanted to try to do was to um write about gay experience from the inside and in a fairly sophisticated way uh without any hint of apology and yet in a way that would be totally accessible to people who weren't gay. And um u I don't know. I mean, once a heterosexual man in England said to me that he never had thought he'd had a single homosexual thought in his whole life, but that he had found himself getting very excited once reading one of my sex scenes between two men. And that thrilled me, not because I had managed to excite this particular man, but who wasn't one of my dream people, but um but just the idea that I had been able to communicate what that kind of desire would be like to somebody who wasn't cut out for it at all. Well, I want to thank you a lot for talking with us. Thank you. I enjoyed it as I always do. Writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1994. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund White

again in 1997, he had written the third book in his trilogy, The Farewell Symphony. The book is narrated by a writer who has outlived most of his gay friends. He's looking back on the 1970s, the post Stonewall pre-ades era. Terry asked Edmund White about how death affected the way he looked back at that era. Please note later there is a discussion of sex, but nothing explicit. One of the things I wanted to show was the 70s as it felt when we were living through it, not from a moralistic uh 80s or 90s point of view. So in other words, it seems to me that a lot of people um are have been critical of the 70s and of the era of promiscuity and they act as though it was almost a natural result that so much sexual activity would have necessarily have led to doom. But I don't believe that at all. And I tried to show that uh that the 70s was in its own way a very idealistic period. not just a hedenistic one but one in which

people really especially gays uh but also I think many feminists were trying to get beyond uh traditional coupling and marriage and were trying to have more extended um patterns of relationship with other people and uh that's something I I find attractive and interesting and I can imagine that if the AIDS virus was ever licked that the gay community might easily go back to that uh you write in the new book that um um what the Stonewall uprising changed was not love so much as self-esteem on which mutual love depends and I'm wondering how you think that sense of adventurous sex with many partners fits into the idea of self-esteem.

Well, I mean I think it's a double-edged sword. I mean, I think that that often times uh I think at another point in the book, I say a life entirely devoted to pleasure can be melancholy. And I think that's true, too. That uh that if you're really a short range hedonist in the sense that you're out looking for another uh uh another sexual adventure every night that there that eventually you feel sort of lonely and uh and perhaps unfulfilled. But on the other hand, I also try to show that a lot of the an so-called anonymous sex is something that people haven't really well understood who are looking at it from the outside that some of the most intense and even romantic uh nights that I ever passed were passed with people whose name I might not have known. And I I think I mentioned in the book uh something that is in fact a true thing that I got uh I got uh a couple of CDs recently from uh a black singer who's

since then become very famous. And he said, "I just wanted to send you these records in memory of a perfect night that we spent together 25 years ago." And it's true. We only spent one night together. Neither of us ever forgot it. He sent me the records and I was very touched. And I think that people have a hard time sometimes imagining that those encounters can be very intense and very very real. There's a passage I'd like you to read from the farewell symphony that is about um the period and about that sense of sexual mania of the period. Sure. We equated sexual freedom with freedom itself. Hadn't the Stonewall uprising itself been the defense of a cruising place? The newer generation might speak of gay culture, but those of us 30 or older, knew the only right we wanted to protect was the right to have as many sexual encounters as possible. Promiscuity, a word we objected to, since it suggested

libertage, and that we wanted to replace with the neutral word adventuring, was something outsiders might imagine would wear thin soon enough. We didn't agree. The fire was in our blood. The more we scratched, the more we itched. Except we would never have considered our desire a form of moral eczema. For us, there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck, or a back room, and plundering body after body. There had been no radical break with the past. We'd all heard about the origins in the Navy during World War II. But at least since I'd first come on the scene in the 1950s, three things had changed.

In New York City, the cops weren't closing down our bars anymore or harassing us if we held hands on the street. We now had a slogan that said, "Gay is good, and we'd stop seeing shrinks in order to go straight." And there were more and more, millions more, gay men with leather jackets and gym built bodies and low voices and good jobs. We used to think we were rare birds. Now, the statistics said that one out of every four men in Manhattan was homosexual. When we marched up Fifth Avenue every June, there were hundreds of thousands of gay men and women, many of them freaks, but the bulk of them, the regular kind of people, we liked.

These were the kinds of guys I had sex with several times every week. If I had sex, say, with an average of three different partners a week from 1962 to 1982 in New York, then that means I fooled around with 3,120 men during my 20 years there. The funny thing is that I always felt deprived, as though all the other fellows must be having more sex than I. A gay shrink once told me that that was the single most common complaint he heard from his patients, even from the real saters. They weren't getting as much sex as the next guy. I was so incapable of fitting my behavior into any general pattern that I would exclaim a gasast, "You know, Liz has been married five times, if my marriages had been legal, they would have been legion." Nor did all this sex preclude intimacy. For those who never lived through that period, and most of those who did are dead. The phrase anonymous sex might suggest

unfeilling sex devoid of emotion. And yet, as I can attest, to hole up in a room at the baths with a body after having opened it up and rung it dry. To lie, head propped on a guy's stomach just where the tan line bexs it. Smoke a cigarette and talk to him late into the night and early into the morning about your childhood, his unhappiness in love, your money worries, his plans for the future. Well, nothing is more personal, more emotional. Of course, the sermons I preached against love and jealousy were all the more absurd because I was so besotted by Kevin. I wanted to be his wife in the most straight laced of marriages. I think that last line gets to exactly the kind of contradiction that I think runs through the book, you know, because every so many of the impulses in this book seem to have contradictory impulses sitting right next to them. And this this passage you read is really in

praise of multiple partners, but then the character is also really yearning for that one person. Yeah. I've always felt that in myself that when people whenever I've had to write something uh about monogamy or or marriage, I've always railed against it. It sort of wells up within me. And yet I it seems to me I've spent most of my life living with a single lover. So it is very contradictory. And I think most of my affairs at least um since the 1980s have been extremely happy. So So how do you explain that contradiction?

I think that there's something in me that doesn't want gay life to be simply an imitation of straight life. Um I think that I probably originally chose gay life. Well, that's absurd because I don't think anybody chooses gay life. But let's say from the very beginning, gay life was twinned in my own mind with with freedom. Freedom from my parents, freedom from middle class conventions, from the Midwest of my childhood. I remember when my father used to come visit me in college, uh the minute he would leave, I would run out and try to pick up somebody. I mean, it was like I had to have an an antidote to uh this heavy, dull bourgeoa world that he represented.

writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund White again in 2006, he had written the autobiography My Lives. They started with a short reading from the chapter My Shrinks. White's mother was a child psychologist, and when he was a child, she sent him to psychologists. He wrote that when he was 15, he stopped thinking of homosexuality as being interestingly artistic and saw it as a problem to be overcome. Already I hoped to be a writer, but as I was beginning to realize, successful writing entailed a grasp of universal values and eternal truths which were necessarily heterosexual.

Foolishly, I had imagined I could transform the dross of homosexuality into the gold of art. But now I saw I could never be a great artist if I remained ignorant of the classical varities of marriage and child rearing, adultery and divorce. But if psychonelosis could convert me into a heterosexual, might it not at the same time ablate the very neurosis that made me want to write? Should I tamper with my neurosis? That's Ed White reading from the first chapter of his new autobiography, My Lives. Uh Ed, welcome back to Fresh Air. The first psychologist who you knew was your own mother who um she became a a child psychologist when you were young and she practiced on you. It's the way you describe it. She practiced administering Rorchack tests on you and psychoanalyzing you. Um was there anything inappropriate to you about that looking back? Well, looking back, yes.

At the time, of course, I you know, you don't really judge your parents that much. Um but um now looking back yes of course I realize it was very crazy and that it wasn't I mean if your mother says to you you have severe psychological problems and you're seven or eight years old that's not an objective uh piece of information for you the child. It it it it becomes something that shapes you and damages you and makes you lose your confidence in in yourself and feel that you're very weird. And that certainly is the way I felt. Are you describing what actually happened that she told you this and that was how you reacted? Yeah. I mean, she did really uh um uh um want to test me all the time. For instance, I remember she giving she gave me a roar shock and she was very dismayed because I didn't see any human beings in it. I only saw gravestones and diamonds and totally weird impersonal things. was in a maybe

quite correctly she saw that as a sign of a of a kind of borderline um u psychosis. I I mean I certainly was a very disturbed child partly because I felt enormously guilty about the my parents' divorce and soon after they did get divorced I locked myself in the bathroom and I wouldn't come out and I kept screaming I did it. I did it. I did it. I mean, it's almost like a classic uh example of of an eatable complex of where the boy wants to get rid of the father and then when he does, he feels terribly guilty. Were most of the psychologists you were sent to when you were young because you were gay or there other reasons why your mother sent you to psychologist or that you wanted to see psychologists?

Oh, it was because I was gay and it was mostly I I was the one who initiated all this. I mean I I I I think I had you know Sartra talks about people who have a bad faith an act of bad faith that that is they're not being honest with themselves and I think I was a classic example of that kind of bad faith because on the one hand I was lusting after boys my own age and even older men and uh that's what I really wanted and I was obsessed with with that idea of of having some sort of sex with older people But on the other hand, I I knew that it was a bad thing and that I also knew that it would limit me as a writer because that was very much the idea in the air that uh a writer could only be successful if he could touch on universal topics and homosexuality was obviously too narrow a focus or too neurotic a point of view to ever make a successful writer. So for various reasons, some of them artistic already

even at that early age of 14, 15, but also just because I wanted to be a regular guy. I mean, teenagers do want to be like other teenagers, and it's really hard to uh to perceive that you're different. Is there anything that really surprises you about what has happened with gay culture since Stonewall? I mean I mean you were you were um active in the gay rights movement you know back then and you've watched gay culture evolve um gay life evolve. What surprises you most? Well, I think um in the in the 70s uh that most gay leaders who the visible active leaders uh politically were leftists and it's because I think people who were uh conservative and gay felt they had nothing to gain by coming out uh at least in a political way. So the gay movement was quite radical and progressive and there was a tremendous emphasis on linking uh the gay fight with the fight of women of blacks and of other minority groups. I think that that

isn't the case anymore. that what happened in the 80s was AIDS killed off a lot of those radical leaders and flushed out of the closet a lot of uh more conservative uh middle class people who sort of took over uh the movement and I think that's fine uh but it has meant that the whole movement as a political movement has drifted uh very much to the right as has the whole culture and in the same way I I think that gays used to feel they had to be cultured. That the most important thing about uh proving that you were uh eligible for gay culture was to have an opinion about Maria Kalis or to have seen the latest Pasolini movie or to have read the latest uh Andre Journal.

Now uh there's very little pressure to do that. And I think that uh gay culture has been dumbed down the way the rest of the culture has been dumbed down and that gays feel that the most important thing is to go to the gym and look great and or maybe have a very good job and uh but I'm of course exaggerating slightly because maybe the final thing to say about difference uh between now and the past is that is that gay culture has become extremely pluralistic. So that you have many people uh who are skinny and don't go to the gym and who are artistic and live in the East Village and you have many people who live in Chelsea where I live who have these big showboat bodies and go to the gym and are mostly interested in that and you have um uh gays of absolutely every stripe and and variety and you have many many people who don't define themselves by their sexuality anymore. I mean, it's quite common for

me to meet a younger person who after I've known him for a few weeks or months even, I'll find out sort of in passing that he is gay. But that isn't the most important thing for him about his identity. Whereas, I think in an earlier period of oppression, it was very important to everybody's identity. You were diagnosed as being HIV positive back in 1985. I'm wondering how having that kind of cloud hanging over your head of being HIV positive has affected your life, you know, because you probably thought at one point that that was an early death sentence. And I definitely did. Yeah.

And and and and you know, thank goodness it turned out not to be, but but you didn't know that. So, did you make changes in your life uh based on the fact that you thought that um you might not have long to live? Well, I think it's made me very productive. Uh, I mean, I think that I'm very grateful for every year that has been granted me and so many of my contemporaries died. I mean I belong to a writer group called the Violet Quill and there were eight of us and only three of us are still alive and um so I think you know uh I sometimes feel that I'm writing the books they might have written or I'm expressing the things that uh otherwise would be lost or anyway I I do feel very grateful uh about having been given this extra lease online. Well, Ed White, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you, Terry. I enjoyed it so much. Edmund White spoke with Terry Gross in 2006. He

died June 3rd at the age of 85. If you want to hear more of our interviews with him, please go to our online fresh air archives.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Remembering writer Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature | Fresh Air"?

David B (Host), Edmund White (Guest), Terry Gross (Host).

What is "Remembering writer Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature | Fresh Air" about?

The piece honors the life and contributions of Edmund White, an influential figure in gay literature who passed away at age 85. It highlights his groundbreaking works, particularly "A Boy's Own Story," and explores the challenges he faced in the publishing industry due to his sexual orientation, as well as the impact of the gay liberation movement on his career.

What is mentioned in this Fresh Air episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Edmund White, Stonewall Rebellion, Gay Liberation, My Lives, A Streetcar Named Desire, Brown University. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Remembering writer Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature | Fresh Air"?

The episode runs 38 min; the transcript is about 6,537 words in 43 timestamped sections.

More from Fresh Air

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.