Skip to Content
Celebrating Canada's 2SLGBTQI+ Communities
Edmund White: Loves Of My Life

Edmund White: Loves Of My Life

Is it possible to write too much about sex? Not for Edmund White, whose new book celebrates the best (and most meaningful) of his sexcapades…

By Paul Gallant

Partway through his long, illustrious writing career, Edmund White, the towering figure of American gay literature, once wrote that he had had sex with about 3,000 men. “One of my contemporaries asked pityingly, ‘Why so few?’”

That’s a line from White’s latest work of non-fiction, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, his 32nd book, in which he draws portraits of some of his most memorable lovers and gives readers postcards of American gay life from the 1950s, when he first started fucking around, until the present loud and proud era.

If there was ever someone who would lose terribly at the game “Never Have I Ever,” it would be White. He started having gay sex at around age 11, with a boy his own age, and by his teens he was paying adult men for sex. When he was around 14 or 15, he initiated an affair with his mother’s boyfriend’s 18-year-old son, named Bob. The relationship emboldened him to come out to his mother. “While she was washing the dishes and I was drying, she said, ‘Dear, I’m thinking of marrying Mr. Hamilton.’ ‘Then,’ I shot back, “it will have to be a double wedding since Bob and I are lovers.’ I’d been reading Oscar Wilde.”

From the very beginning of his literary career, White has been submitting his sex life to the service of his fiction and non-fiction, starting with the book that brought him to national attention, the 1982 novel Boy’s Own Story. He claims to have written “hot fiction” since puberty. But his sex scenes are often expressions of, or an intermission from, less embodied yearnings, including romanticized desire for love and friendship. That soulfulness didn’t stop the books from being titillating. The late American writer Larry Kramer went after White, denouncing his 1997 novel The Farewell Symphony. “He parades before the reader what seems to be every trick he’s ever sucked, fucked, rimmed, tied up, pissed on or been sucked by, fucked by, rimmed by, tied up by…. Surely life was more than this, even for – especially for – Edmund White,” Kramer wrote in 1997 in The Advocate magazine. “He did not spend 30 years with a non-stop erection and an asshole busier than his toilet.”

White laughed about the controversy when I interviewed him by phone late last year. Now 85, and HIV-positive since the early 1980s, he’s outlasted most of his contemporaries, including Kramer. “Larry Kramer was saying, ‘We’re in the midst of the AIDS crisis and you mustn’t be writing about sex and its pleasures,” White told me. “I said, ‘Well, everybody dies from AIDS at the end of that book.’ Anyway, I don’t think young people need to read a $25 hardback of a book by a virtually unknown writer to find out they want to have sex. Larry Kramer and I ended up as friends, even though I rather detested his book Faggots.”

White’s new book uses his many sexual encounters as a method for skipping across the decades, forming a framework for musings on gay cultural life from the closeted 1950s to the hedonistic (if you were living in the right cities) ’70s to the AIDS decades of the ’80s and ’90s to the new hedonism of the PrEP era. 

White spoke with me from his home in New York City, where he lives with the writer Michael Carroll, a husband 25 years his junior. When I got him on the phone, I had to ask if he could guess at his current body count.

“I don’t think the number has gone up greatly,” he told me. “Although I cruise on Silver Daddies, which is, you know, for older men and younger men, their admirers, I don’t get that much action. I think that I had come up with that 3,000 number based on the idea that maybe I had sex two or three times a week for, like, 20 years. Of course, it was almost always with different people. Sex was very much on the hoof. In those days, you could find people, no matter how average looking you were.”

Master of the humble-brag, White loves to make himself the butt of the joke, while simultaneously making his life seem impossibly glamorous. The Loves of My Life starts with, “Although I have a small penis…” and then, 70-some pages later, he recounts a story of how the  photographer Robert Mapplethorpe introduced White to the British writer Bruce Chatwin. “We were still standing in the doorway when we started groping each other.”

White was, of course, at the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. He writes: “I had at one time been a regular patron of this Greenwich Village bar, but in recent months the crowd had changed to kids, mainly from Harlem, many in drag…. Whereas gays had always run away in the past, afraid of being arrested and jailed, these Stonewall African Americans and Puerto Ricans and drag queens weren’t so easily intimidated…. Although I’d been shocked at first by these exuberant actions, soon I felt exhilarated by the expression of the indignation I’d repressed for so long. I was joining in, despite my years of submission.”

But there are lines that even White will not cross. He does not write about his sex life with his husband – or his husband at all, for that matter. Some of the book’s more gossipy bits are written as blind items. There’s the time he had sex with an unnamed “famous German Catholic novelist who had a dick as big as a child’s arm and a bespeckled sweet face like Schubert’s.” I asked White if he agonized about balancing diplomacy with salaciousness. “I was interviewing a famous German woman sculptor, and I mentioned this guy’s name, and she said, ‘Well, I had an affair with him. He’s one for our side.’ But I had had sex with him in Venice. We had remarkable sex. But I decided that if this woman is still close to him and doesn’t know anything about his gay life, I’d better be discreet,” White told me. “And he’s still alive.” 

White also knows how to underplay what is usually shocking. “I was raped two or three times by clever older men,” he starts a section in the chapter called “Mini-Stories.” In another chapter, he recounts a time in the 1970s when he had a “sweet but tiresome slave”: “He was slender and long waisted but not at all muscular. He didn’t exercise, except for his job. He stopped his Kentucky chatter, at least, while performing the awe-inspiring act of crouching and swallowing my recycled beer.” Then White was someone else’s slave: “On another cold evening, he greeted me at the door to his house in a jockstrap and began to flog me. I bellowed my pain but both he and the Slav shushed me; they were afraid a neighbor passing by might hear my cries.”

Although the stories in The Loves of My Live are vividly drawn, White said he doesn’t write anything about his sexual encounters in the moment.

“I never take notes. And I have no journals. It’s all just remembered – or probably I made half of it up. I mean, I really do remember a lot of great sex. You know, I’m just very average looking and now ancient. So, my main emotion in sex is gratitude.”


PAUL GALLANT is a Toronto-based writer and editor who writes about travel, innovation, city building, social issues (particularly LGBT issues) and business for a variety of national and international publications. He’s done time as lead editor at the loop magazine in Vancouver as well as Xtra and fab in Toronto. His debut novel, Still More Stubborn Stars, published by Acorn Press, is out now.

Download IN Magazine January/February 2025 Issue For Free Here

Related Articles

February 11, 2025 / Entertainment Latest

Queer Film ‘On Swift Horses’ Sets Spring 2025 Release Date

On Swift Horses, starring Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar-Jones, will finally hit select theatres across North American on April 25

February 9, 2025 / Entertainment Flashback Latest

FLASHBACK: The First Gay Sitcom Character Appears On TV, Archie’s Pal On All In The Family (February 9, 1971)

Today in 2SLGBTQI+ history

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 17 Episode 6 RECAP: Let’s Get Sea Sickening Ball

The remaining queens make runway looks from sea trash in another sewing challenge. Actress and model Hunter Schaffer and stylist Law Roach are guest judges

POST A COMMENT

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *