“I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.” – Edmund White (b. January 13, 1940). Picture: Edmund White, c. 1980. Photo by Louis Monier, c/o @gettyimages. Edmund White, who turns seventy-seven today, is an American writer and activist, best known for works that present gay themes and culture truthfully, unapologetically, and exquisitely; he also helped form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (@gmhc) in 1982. White had a difficult childhood, both because of the early realization that he was homosexual and because his family life was unhealthy and abusive. “As a young teenager,” he later wrote, “I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn’t the only one; that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.” At fifteen, White wrote his first (unpublished) gay novel, “at a time when there were no other gay novels. So I was really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to myself, I suppose.” After his first two published novels had some success, White collaborated with Dr. Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex” (1977), which introduced him to a wider gay audience. In 1980, he published “States of Desire,” a journal of his travels through gay communities in the United States (it remains a fascinating piece). From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of the groundbreaking gay writers’ collective, The Violet Quill. In 1982, when Larry Kramer organized a group of prominent New York City gay men to discuss how to address the deadly disease that quickly was spreading through their community, White took a lead role in helping form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (@gmhc). The same year, White published his best-known work, “A Boy’s Own Story,” the first in a autobiographic-fiction trilogy—followed by “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” (1988) and “The Farewell Symphony” (1997)—describing the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. White, who also had success with his 1993 biography of Jean Genet, is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. He and his husband, Michael Carroll, have been together since 1995. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #EdmundWhite
