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Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted acclaim for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy’s Own Story – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died aged 85.
His death was confirmed to the Guardian by his agent, Bill Clegg, on Wednesday.
White was a major influence on modern gay literature, with LGBTQ+ writing prizes named after him and authors including Garth Greenwell, Édouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Brandon Taylor and Alexander Chee all noting his importance. 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.”
Born in Ohio in 1940, White grew up in Illinois. 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 he would touch on in his novels. He then moved to New York, then San Francisco, where he began a career as a freelance writer and later a magazine editor.
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. “I think if I wrote it alone it would have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex,” White once joked to the Guardian. “[Silverstein] brought in the warm, cuddly part.”
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).
White lived in France between 1983 and 1990, where he befriended the likes of Michel Foucault and developed an interest in French literature, going on to write admired biographies of Jean Genet – which won White a Pulitzer prize – as well as Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud.
Over his career, White wrote more than 30 books. Some of his more notable novels included The Married Man, which also drew on his life, and Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel about the author Frances Trollope and social reformer Frances Wright.
He also published five memoirs: 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 estimated he slept with three men a week for 20 years; in 1970s New York, he wrote: “I thought it was quite normal to take a break from writing at two in the morning, saunter down to the piers, and have sex with 20 men in a truck. When I wrote that I’d had sex over the years with 3,000 men, one of my contemporaries asked pityingly: ‘Why so few?’”
White was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984. “I wasn’t surprised, but I was very gloomy,” he told the Guardian in January. “I kind of pulled the covers over my head and thought: ‘Oh gee, I’ll be dead in a year or two’ … it turned out that I was a slow progressor.”
White taught at Brown University and became a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
White is survived by Michael Carroll, his husband and partner of almost 30 years.
