Born in 1940, when homosexuality was considered a treatable mental disorder, Edmund White spent his early life acutely aware of his same sex-attraction and eager to act on it. Just as often as his exploratory cruising led him to hotel rooms and the passenger seats of suburban dads’ cars, it placed him on therapists’ couches, seeking a cure for his homosexuality. In 1977, he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, encouraging readers to be self-accepting, even as he wrestled with self-loathing. Did I always endure unreciprocated love because I could only love (and write about it) when I was rejected? With a body count in the thousands, one could argue that though self-acceptance may not have always come easily to White, sex always has.  In The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, White lets his recollections of sexual encounters guide the narrative of his life, bouncing from pleasure to pleasure, partner to partner, across decades, movements, and continents. Along the way White deploys his singular wit to weave a tapestry of queer history as seen through the lens of a writer who has lived through McCarthyism anti-wokeism and everything in between.

Edmund and I were introduced by his husband, Michael Carroll (White on Carroll: “I’ve never written about him; he’s too precious to me.”). We met on zoom shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday, shivering in our respective apartments to discuss, in addition to his upcoming memoir, writing to gay readers, and his hatred of cuddling. 

Stephen Patrick Bell: Hello. Okay, I can hear you now.

Edmund White: Well, good. I'm sorry I couldn't get it to work.

SPB: No, that’s fine. It's always weird, the first few moments of a zoom interaction. Will I be able to see you today?

EW: Oh, you can't see me?

SPB: Not yet. 

EW: No, okay, let's see. 

SPB: And now I can see you. Great.

EW: Hello, hello. How are you today? Good? Is it freezing cold there?

SPB: Absolutely yes. I haven't been outside today.

EW: It’s really cold here. Almost too cold to sleep, you know? I have an electric blanket, but now I have a full-time space hater on, and my apartment has always seemed warm enough before, but not now.

SPB: This doesn’t feel normal, even for Chicago. I'm learning where all my drafty windows are very quickly.

EW: I love Chicago. I grew up in Evanston.

SPB: I know. It's strange. I know a bit more about you than you do about me, since I've read so much of you. Starting with just this book [The Loves of My Life], I just feel like a lot of the best, or at least my favorite, memoirists are often good at observing the people around them and the situations that they're in while deflecting attention away from themselves, even as they're the center of the narrative that the reader is engaged in. I feel like My Lives did that a lot, but you're not doing that so much in The Loves of My Life. I was wondering: what changed?

EW: Oh, well, I guess it takes two to tango. In My Lives, I did force myself, like I did in the first chapter, to talk about shrinks and all my years on the couch, and whether I really thought it was worth it or not. I did try to present myself in a personal way. I used to tell my students when we would talk about autobiography that they were too modest, that they didn't talk about themselves enough, and that that was the thread that kept the reader reading: the narrator.

SPB: Thinking more about specific moments that you chose to focus on, and you mentioned therapy – your career spans a period when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, to a point where there was gay liberation and acceptance, and now we’re creeping back into that point where you're allowed to say that queer people, gay people, LGBTQ people, are mentally ill on social media.

EW: And trans people have taken a real blow under Trump already. I have a very good friend who is transitioning, and it was a real blow for him when he saw that Trump doesn't want the government to pay for or be involved in any kind of surgery for trans people. I think a lot of the victimization of gay people has gone toward a victimization of trans people

SPB: While we’re on the subject of therapy – what were some of your favorites of the diagnoses thrown at or attached to you, and how did those impact the way that you were engaging with yourself or the people around you?

EW: When I was like 14, I had told my mother I was gay, and she sent me to a very strict Freudian, and I had been reading lots of Oscar Wilde, so I couldn't keep myself from making quips to this guy. He reported back to my mother that I was really mentally ill, and they should institutionalize me and throw away the key.

SPB: I take it that didn't stick. 

EW: No, thank God. I mean, one of the things that shrinks used to do is, of course, they thought homosexuality was a terrible illness, but they also thought it was only a symptom of some deeper disorder. Usually, it was a devouring mother and an absent father.

SPB: You've written about your relationship with your parents and how resilient you had to be just to survive those relationships intact. The Loves of My Life kept making me ask how did these two particular relationships inform everything that came after them? You’ve written a lot about them in other contexts, but it was interesting to feel the influence of your parents skirting around the edges of your sex memoir.

EW: I'm writing poems, and I'll send you this one poem I wrote about my parents, I just wrote it a few weeks ago. I talk to my sister all the time, who is totally unforgiving to my parents, and I mean, she may have reason to be, more than me. In my poem, I try to remember some positive things, like how our mother at this time of year or Christmas would make us these enormous fruit cakes. She didn't have much money, and she would invest a lot of money into buying all these ingredients. She was in her late eighties and she was hobbling around, making these fruitcakes, which she would send wrapped in sheets with whiskey soaked through. My sister just assumed they were store bought. I said, no, I remember that the agony she went through trying to do that. Then when she got to be really old, she couldn't do it anymore, and she was so upset about that. That was one nice thing I could think. I mean, there were many nice things about my mother, but that was one that stuck out.

Then about my father. My father loved classical music and was a big patron of the symphony, and we would always go every week. He was a night owl, and he stayed up all night and slept all day and, when he was awake, he constantly had classical music playing. Suddenly I thought, wait a minute, those records didn't just come the through the mail. He had to go to a shop and buy them, and he had exquisite taste. He was a big old engineer, you know, who never read a book and never had a kind word for anybody and was always very angry. So how did he know? Did he choose the records of things he'd heard at the symphony that he liked, or had he read about it, or did he consult the storekeeper? I don't know, but anyway, I wrote about those two things.

SPB: The way you talk about your father having this sort of almost tenderness to him, or a sense of taste that didn't necessarily match with how he presented in the world reminds me of the Pedro essay. There was something about that in Pedro too, where there was a sort of sweetness on the surface, and then there was like a more sinister side to the way that he engaged with you intimately. Something else you address in the top of that essay is how the slippery chronology of this memoir skips back and forth in time, flitting between cherished sexual memories, like a masturbatory time machine. I was surprised to read in your sex memoir that you’ve given up on masturbation. Was writing this book like reconnecting with the habit?

EW: I mean, to be honest, the last time I came was when I had sex with a guy who I know quite well and who knows all my little foibles and sensitive spots. I almost feel like writing him and saying, please come back and release me again. But I don't know if it would even work this time. But, anyway, that must have been the last time I came. You know, I always jerked off several times a day all my life, and it was like my sleeping pill too. I do get horny, but that makes me cruise online just to look at people. I don't look at very much porno, just a little bit, and I'll get obsessed with one or two certain people online. In other words, it's pretty much a thing of the past.

My best friend, who was my student and whom I zoom every day, he's really angry at me because I said in an interview, just gabbing to the to the Guardian, that I was so impervious to sex now. He is so beautiful and a champion athlete and whatnot. I woke up one morning – he was sleeping in my bed – and he had his erection in my hand. I said, oh come on I don't want to do this. He was so mad at me for repeating that and now, I just repeated it to you. I felt heartbroken, because it sounded like I somehow thought I was superior to him. But quite the contrary. I feel he's the major beauty, and everybody wants him. He is an extraordinary boy, a good writer, a great reader, a wonderful poet, a great friend, and I really hurt him. You know, and he went on and on about that last night in our call. I guess this dangerous territory. In World War II, they said loose lips sink ships. I guess I'm guilty of loose lips.

SPB: Definitely. You wrote a whole essay about this interaction in your memoir. Your editor, Daniel Loedel must have been helpful with the loose lips issue. You mentioned that you're wandering a bit in this book, which I actually really liked, because it did illuminate a lot of things that I had inklings about. It seemed like when you weren't distracted by distracting us, it gave us more of you. There is a sweet intimacy you crafted there. I was also pleased that Daniel had pulled back on some of the self-deprecation that you can rely on.

EW: Well, in A Previous Life, I really went in for that. I don't know if you've read that book, but I, but I would knock myself out attacking myself. It was partly because I had one reader in mind, that is the Italian who had left me and I thought, I don't want to exalt myself at his expense. I want to admit that I know why he rejected me, that I was too old, that any normal person would do that too, so I don't know. I guess sometimes I go into these orgies of self-deprecation. 

SPB: What were some of the other things that Daniel did that were most helpful to you for this book?

EW: As you know, I have, like a free-associating mind and if I strayed too far from the point, he would curb me back. We had legal problems with one of the good anecdotes. He was just too easily identified, he was from a famous family that, and it was just easier to cut it than try to doctor it.

SPB: You did part of my job for me by interviewing yourself in a poem at the end of your sadomasochism essay. You say were writing with the idea of a particular reader for at least some of your work, in the case of A Previous Life, the Italian who left you. Do you often write to yourself in this way? I found it to be a really moving piece, and I was curious how often you enter that mode.

EW: The strange thing is that is that, because I'm so confessional as a writer, when I'm on stage, let's say in front of a crowd, the interviewer will think he's perfectly licensed to ask me really embarrassing questions. I mean, those questions are no more embarrassing what than what I've already admitted to in writing. But I think I'm more of a literary exhibitionist than an actual one. I always quote Noël Coward, who was at a party where some younger gay guy kept cozying up to him. Finally, Noël Coward said, don't imagine that we're friends just because we share the same vice. 

SPB:  You described homosexual life as difficult for the reader to understand. It made me wonder, who are you writing to in some of these essays? Sometimes it feels like you're talking to me, and I understand that we are in a sort of community together, where we have a certain shorthand.  Other times it feels like you are describing us or what our world might be like to someone who's well outside of it. I’m curious as to when you make those choices, and why you make those choices, as to who to include in the conversation, and who do you most often see yourself in conversation with?

EW: Well, for a long time, I thought it my ideal reader as Mrs. Nabokov, because I knew that she spoke English perfectly, she lived in America, and she knew a lot about American life. On the other hand, she lived mostly in Russia and Germany, and then finally Switzerland and America. I thought that would be a way of filtering out. I mean, to assume that you had a sympathetic reader, one who was very intelligent but not informed, not about details. You couldn't talk about brand names and assume that somebody like her would get it. I did meet her, and she was a wonderful, charming woman, and she had an eidetic memory. She'd memorized a few pages from Forgetting Elena, which he could recite by memory. That was a great thrill. I think during the AIDS crisis, when I was living in Paris and not really part of a gay community, certainly not the kind of supportive gay community of other people who were HIV-positive that you could have in America. I had been the first president of the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York and then briefly I participated in the French counterpart, but basically, I felt very lonely and alone with my HIV-positive verdict. [At that time] I began to think about the reader as being another gay man of my age.

People oftentimes talk about the kind of post-Stonewall generation of writers, and they try to see what our defining characteristics are. I think that one thing is that we often are addressing a gay reader in the sense that we didn't feel like we had to explain where Fire Island was or what rimming was. It's like when I was a child, I used to look at the New Yorker magazine and their jokes would just assume that you knew that Park Avenue is under construction, or whatever. The jokes would always be very local about New York life, and I always found that very exotic and fascinating. When I started writing books after Stonewall and while living in France, which I did for 16 years, and being kind of alone with my positive status, I began to think I wanted to address other gay men.

SPB: The Stonewall essay marks a shift or a departure in the collection. You’ve touched on this already, but could you speak more directly on how that event changed your writing?

EW: I attribute a big sea change to Stonewall. It wasn't just one event among many. For me, at least, it was a real change. Soon after Stonewall, I moved to Rome and lived there for a year. When I came back, everything had changed in New York. There hadn't been gay bars at all, except for Julius’ in New York. The mayor had closed them all down as soon as they would open. But now, post-Stonewall, there were all these back-room bars and discos and everything. There were also lots of consciousness raising groups that I joined and things like the Gay Academic Union and gay baseball teams, groups for blind people who are gay, you know, things like that.

I guess I write ahead of my emotions, in the sense that I oftentimes pretend to be more liberated and sort of saucy than I really am. I always did that. I co-authored the Joy of Gay Sex and I had to defer to my writing partner, who had come out late, who didn't know much about cruising or gay life, but knew a lot about intimacy. He was a really wonderful man and shrink, my shrink, in fact. If I'd written it [alone it] would have been The Tragedy of Gay Sex, probably. But he was always very warm, and he would bring the warmth through the page.

SPB: I'm forgetting your co-author, for The Joy of Gay Sex, that was Charles

EW: Silverstein

SPB: You mentioned that he was more well-versed in intimacy than sex. We're reading The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. In what ways would your intimacy memoir look different from this book?

EW: Well, I don't think I'm cold exactly, but I'm kind of standoffish. I hate cuddling, and I if I'm exposed to somebody for too long and in too sustained a way I want them to get out of my hair and I want to wash the whole house down in Lysol. I guess, I’m your typically white, standoffish WASP in that way. But, on the other hand, all my relationships have been very long. I mean, I'm still friends with my college lover, Stanley Redfern, who's in the book. He comes to visit me once a week, and he's reading my entire oeuvre, which nobody's ever done before. He writes me little reviews of it, and he’s very enthusiastic. So, it's not like I'm a block of eyes, but I do have my standoffishness, I guess you might say.

SPB: On that note, I want to read this to you and just see where, where it lands. It's back to the Pedro essay.

For me, sex was mostly mental and active submission, even of humiliation, certainly not a proof of virility or a simple physical release. 

There’s just something about that notion where you make sex sound like work —

EW: *laughs* Yes!

SPB: And sometimes love feels like a trap, like a cage of anxieties. I was wondering if you could speak a little to that, and whether it's always like that for you, or if this is a moment that you're that you've captured.

EW: I think I've, I always managed to get sex out of my intimate relationships very quickly. I've been with, well – I'm probably loose lips here – but, anyway in all my long affairs, I got the sex out of it pretty early on.

SPB: It's more efficient. Fewer distractions. What’s distracting you lately?

EW: I'm finishing a novel now called Hospitality, but my next book is going to be, if I live that long, will be about Louis XIV gay brother, Monsieur, who had a shadow court, just like Louis XIV, but all men, and they were all dishy, and they had to sign a release form saying they would never touch a woman, but they were constantly backsliding because most of them weren't even Gay. They were just social climbers.

SPB: So, basically, nothing has changed since then.

EW: Right!