Edmund White: Remembering the Groundbreaking Gay Writer

LGBTQ&A

Jeffrey Masters

Society & Culture

4.7 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me, it would be thousands of sex partners."

Edmund White died this week at the age of 85. Earlier this year, I got to speak with him at his home in N.Y.C. about his latest novel, "The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir", co-writing "The Joy of Gay Sex" with Dr. Charles Silverstein, and his evolving relationship to sex.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Edmund White died this week at the age of 85, and I don't think it's hyperbole or
0:10.6	exaggeration to say that he was one of the greats, a pioneering author who helped to pave
0:16.5	the way for many of the gay writers who are published today. He co-wrote The Joy of Gay Sex with Dr. Charles Silverstein that was groundbreaking when it
0:26.0	came out in 1977, but he's published over 30 books, biographies, novels, memoirs,
0:32.8	novels that were more or less memoirs. He did it all and right up until the very end.
0:39.4	I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with him this past February, where I found that he was
0:44.7	brilliant, as expected, yes, but also just as curious to hear and ask me questions about my life
0:50.9	as I was to hear about his. I was there to talk to him about his latest book called The Loves of My Life, a Sex Memoir.
0:59.0	Agile Here, looking back over his career, it wasn't the awards or the bestsellers that stood out the most to him.
1:06.0	It was all of the sex that he had.
1:08.0	By his estimate, he had sex with over 3,000 people, which he cataloged
1:13.2	really beautifully in his new book. So without further ado, I'm Jeffrey Masters, and this is
1:20.5	LGBTQ&A with the late Edmund White. So going back.
1:44.6	So going back to the 1960s when you first moved to New York City, at that time you were, you were meeting men, you were having sex with men, you were living what appeared to be like a gay life,
1:52.5	and yet also you were willingly seeing a shrink to try to make you straight. And I've worked for time life and where I had to be closeted. Right. And so at that time, though, like, how are you
2:00.0	thinking about like your sexuality?
2:03.4	I wanted to be a writer, and I, that was before any of these tell all biographies came out.
2:12.5	I mean, like, we thought all the great writers were straight, because we didn't know about the private life of somebody like Cheever.
2:23.4	And I thought it would be a horrible handicap to be gay.
2:27.3	I mean, we didn't even know about the sexuality of Proust, for instance.
2:32.7	So you were thinking about all of these greats and saying, if I want to be that, I cannot be gay.
2:38.4	Yeah, exactly.
	...

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