Edmund White, a writer widely regarded as a pioneering figure in the world of LGBTQ+ literature, has sadly passed away at the age of 85. During his career, he penned and published over 30 books including his semi-autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story, and the non-fiction book, The Joy of Gay Sex with Charles Silverstein; the latter of which was later revised by Felice Picano in The New Joy of Gay Sex.
His other nonfiction books included States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (2009) and his latest work, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, published in January 2025.
Edmund was born in 1940 in Cincinnati. He came out to his mother as gay as a teenager, and his mother’s response was to send him to a psychiatrist.
“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” the author wrote in his 1991 essay ‘Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf.‘
Although he was accepted to Harvard, White chose instead to attend the University of Michigan due to its proximity to his therapist, where he majored in Chinese. He then moved to New York in 1962 where he worked for the publisher, Time-Life Books.
White became immersed in New York’s LGBTQ+ scene and recounted witnessing a pivotal moment in LGBTQ+ history, the Stonewall Uprising. Despite leaving the city for a while, living in Rome for a time and working as an editor of The Saturday Review in San Francisco, White was drawn back to New York in 1973.
That same year, he published his debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), which was later followed up by two more works in the trilogy, The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).
In a 2012 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, White stated: “People always ask me, ‘Do you ever start a book and then put it aside and do something different?’ And, unfortunately, no, I always write everything right to the bitter end.”
Edmund White’s death at the age of 85 was confirmed by his agent, and his husband of over ten years, Michael Carroll. It was reported that Edmund had collapsed following a “vicious stomach bug”. The exact cause of death is as of yet unknown. The writer had been diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s and was a long-term survivor who had also survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014.
