Edmund White, the gay literary icon who witnessed the Stonewall uprising and influenced a generation of LGBTQ+ writers, has died.
According to The Guardian, White, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1985, was experiencing symptoms of a stomach illness on Tuesday at the home he shared in New York City with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, and died while waiting for an ambulance. He was 85.
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“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,” Carroll told The Guardian of his late husband.
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Over the course of his career, White published more than 30 works, including novels, memoirs, plays, and biographies. He received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other accolades. He was perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story, which became a foundational coming-of-age text for gay men of his generation and was adapted into a 2022 graphic novel by Carroll and Brian Alessandro, with art by Igor Karash.
White was also the co-author of 1977’s groundbreaking The Joy of Gay Sex with psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, and his 1994 biography of Jean Genet remains perhaps the definitive work on the iconoclastic queer French writer.
Born in Cincinnati in 1940, White arrived in New York City in the early 1960s, where he quickly found himself at the center of several significant LGBTQ+ political and cultural movements. While out for a nighttime stroll in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969, he and then-lover Charles Burch happened to witness the uprising at the Stonewall Inn.
“There were all these bright lights and policemen dragging out angry Black drag queens,” White recalled in a 2022 interview with LGBTQ Nation. “I was surprised that I felt my own indignation being inflamed. And that was part of the revelation of Stonewall for me.”
In the early 1980s, White was a member of the short-lived gay writers group the Violet Quill, which included other influential writers like Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. And in 1982, he co-founded the community-based AIDS service nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis (now known as GMHC) alongside activist and writer Larry Kramer and others.
White continued to write about gay life well into his 80s, frequently centering gay
He also remained a mentor to younger gay writers. As Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States, told LGBTQ Nation in 2022, white was “an extraordinarily generous person with his connections, with helping people, really in the best traditions of the early gay movement of seeing a movement as a community.”
Many of those writers and friends posted tributes to White on social media as news of his death broke Wednesday.
“Edmund White was an incredible friend. Loyal, generous, beautiful, caring. He was always supporting and encouraging young writers, like no one else,” author Edouard Louis wrote in an Instagram post. “Edmund’s and Micheal’s appartement [sic] was one of the last literary salon [sic] on earth. Edmund would spend hours telling stories about his friends, anecdotes about Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Michel Foucault. He would make us laugh – a lot.”
“I can’t believe I won’t get to hear him giggle over some salacious literary gossip ever again. Ever again. Or read more of his beautiful writing,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Sean Greer wrote on Instagram. “He was, perhaps, the last ‘man of letters’ in the United States, a writer who could move between criticism, fiction, memoir, biography because his mind could go anywhere. With delight. He was delightful. I will miss him always.”
Author Christopher Bollen remembered White as “The bravest, kindest, and cleverest. The naughtiest and wisest and eternally young. Always curious, always game, always excited by this or that new book or person or story about some boy or place or love affair that lasted two days. So giving, so kind, so worldly and yet so Cincinnati midwestern. Always there, never jaded, a tireless believer in novels and friendship. He taught me so much, not least of what a literary life looked like.”
Cabaret star and 2024 MacArthur Fellow Justin Vivian Bond noted that White’s loss is particularly poignant “at the beginning of a Pride month when a war over language, and the erasure of our people and our history through executive fiat is in full swing.”
“Let’s extend our gratitude for the rich legacy this brilliant man has left behind,” Bond added.
“We’re not so different,” White told LGBTQ Nation in 2022 when asked what he would like younger LGBTQ+ people to understand about gay men of his generation. “We may sound sentimental, but we’re still very romantic, and that we’ve been through a lot. To be oppressed in the ’50s, liberated in the ’60s, and almost wiped out in the ‘70s and ’80s — it’s a very fast wash-and-rinse cycle. I think that gay history has been very sped up, and I think that has left a lot of marks on these old walruses like me who still exist.”
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