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.
