Edmund White, the towering figure of American gay literature who wrote more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, has died. He was 85-years-old…
Edmund White, the openly gay American writer, playwright and essayist who was renowned for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy’s Own Story (1982) – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) – has died at the age of 85.
White died on Tuesday, June 3, 2025 while waiting for an ambulance after experiencing symptoms of a stomach illness. His death was confirmed by his agent, Bill Clegg, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Clegg did not immediately provide any additional details. White had been HIV positive since the 1980s and survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014.
Michael Carroll, White’s husband and partner of almost 30 years, said: “He was wise enough to be kind nearly always. He was generally beyond exasperation and was generous. I keep thinking of something to tell him before I remember.”
Born in Cincinnati in 1940, White moved with his mother to the Chicago area at age 7 after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer “who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.” His mother a psychologist “given to rages or fits of weeping.”
“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,” he wrote in the essay “Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,” which was published in 1991.
He was accepted to Harvard but instead chose to attend the University of Michigan in order to stay near his therapist, who had assured White he could “cure” homosexuality; a decision that he would touch on in many of his novels. After University, White then moved to New York in the early 1960s, then San Francisco, where he began a career as a freelance writer and later a magazine editor.
White was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement. “Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” he once wrote. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”
His 1973 debut novel, Forgetting Elena, was praised by Vladimir Nabokov as “a marvelous book.” It was followed in 1977 by The Joy of Gay Sex, a pioneering sex manual White wrote with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. In 1978 he published Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which took the form of letters from a young gay man to his deceased ex-lover. He followed up with the nonfiction States of Desire in 1980.
For much of White’s career he drew on his own life to write novels about gay men and sexual freedom. Arguably his best-known work, 1982’s A Boy’s Own Story, was the first in a trilogy that drew on his life from boyhood to middle age, followed by The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).
Over his career, White wrote more than 30 books, many of which were critical successes, and several were worldwide best-sellers. The Chicago Tribune labeled him “the godfather of queer lit.” Some of his more notable novels included The Married Man (2000), which also drew on his life, and Fanny: A Fiction (2003), a historical novel about the author Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright.
He also published five memoirs throughout his life: My Lives in 2005; City Boy, about his life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, in 2009; Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, in 2014; The Unpunished Vice, about his tastes in literature, in 2018; and The Loves of My Life, about his prolific sex life, in 2025.
White was a major influence on modern gay literature, with a number of LGBTQ+ writing prizes named after him. Having come up in the late 1970s, he once said of his generation: “Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for straight readers. We had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. We didn’t have to spell out what Fire Island was.”
IN Magazine‘s Paul Gallant recently sat down with White to discuss 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. (Click here to read: “Edmund White: Loves Of My Life” from our January/February 2025 issue.)
White won countless awards for his writing throughout his career and sat on countless award juries. He taught writing at several universities, including Brown and Princeton, where he was on the faculty from 1999 to 2018.
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