CHICAGO — About a week after Edmund White turned 82, we spoke on the phone.
There was too much to ask.
To be honest, it’s a little hard to know where to begin with Edmund White. Soon after he left Evanston, Illinois, not long after college, he became at editor at Saturday Review; soon after that, he cowrote “The Joy of Gay Sex.” At the time of the Stonewall uprising in 1969 (which he witnessed), he was a staff writer for Time-Life Books. He was friends with Toni Morrison, James Merrill, Robert Mapplethorpe, Foucault; he was frenemies with Susan Sontag. He cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, then learned a few years later that he was HIV-positive. Today he’s often described as the godfather of queer lit.
Despite all of that, not to sound reductive and puerile, but when I think of Edmund White I think about sex. Which is partly intentional on his part. A few years ago, he wrote in the New Yorker that he “always associated reading and writing with sex,” and that even as a young writer he knew sex “had already become my great theme, in all its many forms.”
He wrote of taking the “L” from Evanston to Rush Street and often visiting a bookstore owned by “a pockmarked, sombre Texan.” White was attracted to him. He said he was looking for an older lover. “I felt at home among the books,” he wrote, “and turned on.”
For several decades, White would return again and again to sex, in memoirs thinly disguised as novels (“A Boy’s Own Story”), and in memoirs full of novelistic incident (“City Boy”). His plots, he has said, are almost always much closer to scrapbooks. Indeed, his prose reads like an ongoing diary, even when, as in his new novel, “A Previous Life,” that plot is inventive, even meta; it tells the story of an Sicilian aristocrat and his wife who confess to past lovers — one of whom is the author Edmund White.
He spoke from his apartment in New York City. The following is a shorter version of a longer conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Q: I don’t know much about your Chicago years.
A: When I was 7, my parents got divorced. We had lived in Cincinnati until (White and his mother) moved to Evanston and I went to Miller School. I belonged to the Eisenhower Club at the YMCA. My mother was a psychologist and worked for the state and we moved for a year to Rockford, which I hated. So we went back to Evanston. My mother lived most of her life in Chicago, near Water Tower. My sister lives in Oak Park.
Q: Do you think of yourself as a Midwesterner?
A: No, more like a Europeanized American. I lived in Paris 17 years, in Rome a year. I can speak French as well as I speak English. I spent summers in Istanbul and Greece. But I do have certain Midwestern values. I think of myself as a public-library intellectual.
Q: You are often compared with Proust.
A: Yes, I went to Cranbrook in Michigan, which then was a boy’s school and for my senior thesis, I wrote about Proust. So he’s definitely been on my mind for a long time, particularly what he called the Albertine Strategy — to make all the boys into girls. I haven’t done that with this new book, but then there have been quite a few bisexuals.
Q: You’re so associated with writing about sex, it’s funny in this new book when there’s a mention of the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, which is a real award.
A: I think I will receive it. That (award) is in England, where they hate sex.
Q: Have your readers become more conservative?
A: Yeah, but everyone has. Certainly gay people have. They’re all married with children. A lot of my friends pretend to be faithful to their husbands but then they’re online a lot, cruising. So I don’t know. It used to be that gay life was like a French bedroom farce. You would catch your mate having sex with the butler. Now people hide affairs online. But also, (the fear of) AIDS had a major impact, of course. I’ve been (HIV) positive since 1985, and they will have to bring in Dr. Kevorkian to kill me. I keep going on and on.
Q: When you write about yourself sexually, you’re often not very complimentary.
A: Yes, I believe in truth telling, and as in the book, I did have an Italian lover who brutally dropped me after a three-year affair and who was very possessive, and I went through a terrible period — I’m still going through it — of feeling totally rejected. I write in the book, “You don’t play with the heart of an 80-year-old.” I have tried to see myself through his eyes. He sought me because of my writing, and it was this formal “Professor White” kind of thing for a while, but that went to being sexual very quickly. He lived in Europe but then moved to America to be with me, and then realized that I was too old.
Q: Do you write about sex often because you would like it seem more ordinary?
A: I think it’s always underrepresented in fiction.
Q: As a kid in Chicago, did you linger over sex scenes in novels?
A: Well, I was already very active sexually. I must have had sex with several hundred men by the time I was 16.
Q: Several hundred?
A: Yeah, I would go to the Howard Street station and pick up men. I was jailbait, so no one would want to see me twice. They were afraid of getting caught. I would have sex with men in their station wagons, which would be full of their children’s toys. I was the seducer. A friend of mine said he’d never seen someone as voracious in their appetites.
Q: When you started writing novels, what kind of audience did you have in mind?
A: The thing is, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin — their books were directed to straight readers. What happened after Stonewall, with this group of writers I belonged to, called the Violet Quill, we were all directing our books toward gay readers. Instead of writing apologies for gay lives, instead of writing about this seemingly exotic life for straight readers, we did not explain, say, Fire Island. That was a big change. But then, you could be attacked for writing about gay lives in a non-ideal way. There was a Stalinist edge to gay criticism in the 1970s where you would be attacked for not having positive role models. I was living in a particular historical moment. Gays had been persecuted. In Chicago I would go to a lesbian bar on the Near North Side called The Volleyball. They had a dusty sign on the wall that said “Hobo Party Tonight.” No one remembers this, but women could be arrested as transvestites if they wore more than three items of male clothing! But “Hobo Party,” that suggested this was a costume party! Therefore legal.
Q: You’re kind of a vanguard now, but how will you be read in 50 years?
A: I have a dim view of this. I was just in Key West at a literary seminar and on stage, I said: Don’t you think “homosexuality” sounds very old fashioned now? That maybe in 50 years everyone will be a bisexual? Everyone seemed quite alarmed by that. Or titillated.
