Edmund White, once dubbed “the paterfamilias of queer literature,” tells all in a frisky new memoir, The Loves of My Life, which the prolific American writer, scholar and essayist calls a “summing up” of his estimated 3,000 sexual encounters.

“I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them – for me it would be thousands of sex partners,” White writes early in the book. He just turned 85, and marked the occasion with a pizza party, he says in a phone interview from his home in New York City. 

His fifth memoir is a scant 225 pages – a surprise, given the robust number of men (and women) he’s bedded – compared to the infamous 1888 erotic diary, My Secret Life, where an anonymous Victorian gentleman recounts hundreds of sexual escapades in 11 volumes totalling 4,000 pages. When I mention this, the author of more than a dozen novels giggles. “One of my ideas was not to repeat the sex stories that I used in my fiction – to talk about new people,” he explains about the by-no-means exhaustive catalogue of men (and occasionally women) he seduced or hired. For legal reasons, he adds, he had to drop some chapters.

“Gay men are (or were, in my day) always ready for sex,” he writes. After declaring he’s been “a practicing gay” since age 13, the compelling memoir enumerates with candour the who, what, where, when, how – and why. It is intimate, yet expansive, because in recounting his sexual history, it details the evolving gay experience across seven decades in America.

History Unbound 

It begins in the oppressive 1950s, when, as a teen in Cincinnati, Ohio, White hired straight “hillbilly” hustlers from Kentucky to service him. In unembellished, explicit detail, White charts his course, from the funk of unwashed prepubescent jeans and looking for hook-ups on the gay dating site, SilverDaddies, to the 1969 Stonewall riots, the shift to the carefree 1970s and the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. As White has recounted before, he was at the Stonewall riots the moment someone yelled “Gay is Good,” in imitation of the slogan “Black is Beautiful.” “In that moment we went from seeing ourselves as a mental illness to thinking we were a minority,” he writes.

“Because I’ve witnessed all this drama and melodrama, I’m perfectly situated to view how we got here,” he says of milestones like the legalization of gay marriage and the emergence of LGBTQ rights. White’s also lived to tell the tale. He has been HIV-positive since 1985, “that I know of – and by some miracle, I survived,” he says. “So, I guess I partly do feel somewhat of a need to bear witness.”

A co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, America’s oldest AIDS organization,(with the late activist, Larry Kramer), White was part of the Violet Quill gay writers group, and has chronicled the gay experience through memoirs, fiction and essays. His many laurels include PEN America’s lifetime achievement award, being made an officer of France’s order of arts and letters and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented to him at the 2019 National Book Awards by his pal, filmmaker John Waters.

A Boy’s Own Story, the landmark 1982 coming-of-age novel that made him famous, was recently adapted into a graphic novel, which he hopes will reach a new generation, but in writing The Loves of My Life, “I assumed that it would be a gay reader, of all ages,” he says.

Sex on the Brain  

White’s acclaimed novels reflect his own experiences more directly than most writers (a trick he learned from the French writer, Colette) and sex between men features prominently in the narratives. He literally wrote the book on gay sex, The Joy of Gay Sex, a bestselling 1977 primer that encouraged self-acceptance.

“I think somewhere out there I said ‘sex is the most powerful language we speak,’” he reiterates. At several points in The Loves of My Life and our conversation, White expresses disappointment that writers of serious literature eschews sex scenes and pop culture shies away from depicting it on screens. He’s heartened when I tell him about Daniel Craig’s slurpy passionate fellatio scene in Queer, and that the recent gay period drama Fellow Travelers was explicit enough to prompt Pride.com to rank all 13 of its sex scenes.

In his acknowledgments, White self-deprecatingly likens himself to an old man “spinning random anecdotes after dinner over brandy,” but there’s a stealth strategy to the memoir. As he recalls the erotic charge of oral ministrations, anatomizes sexual acts and deconstructs the pleasures of the body, he’s also turning the gaze inward on the psychology of promiscuity, sadomasochism and sex with straight men. It’s unsentimental, and there’s incidental sociology in his observations. “Foucault said that courtship was the most romantic moment for heterosexuals but that for gays it was the aftermath, the taxi ride alone uptown,” he writes in a chapter about keeping a detached distance from an object of desire.

Erudite and witty, White flits between X-rated anecdotes about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and his onetime roommate, Keith McDermott (the gorgeous star of 1970s Broadway’s longrunning Equus,) and peppering the memoir with a range of cultural references, from English poet William Blake and American actor Tab Hunter to the Sesame Street Muppet, Mr. Snuffleupagus and German director Max Ophuls.

Mostly – though not strictly – chronological, White takes palpable delight in remembering his tricks and trysts, joyfully turning over the memories as though handling beloved souvenirs. The energetic momentum propels the episodes to the present, when the last chapter, which contains a poem for his last lover, an Italian man called Giovanni, strikes an unexpectedly elegiac tone. “I do feel like this book probably is a little more cheerful than I really am,” he admits.

Home and Abroad

White spent years living in Venice, Madrid, on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris, cruising the Colosseum in Rome in the wee hours and later teaching creative writing at Princeton University. He and his husband, writer Michael Carroll, 60, have been together since 1995 and have an open marriage, though White tells me matter-of-factly he doesn’t have sex any more. He was also a great walker – my first introduction to White was through his 2001 memoir of ramblings across Paris, The Flâneur – “and now I can’t walk at all, except with a rollator.” But he’s not at all bitter or depressed, he says. Overcoming multiple strokes and a heart attack in recent years, White’s various health and medical realities make him hyper-vulnerable to infections like COVID-19, and these days he lives a more circumscribed life in his Chelsea apartment, crammed with books.

Our appointed interview time got pushed back, White divulges, because new research material got him so excited he didn’t get to sleep until 6 a.m. He’s been poring over histories of the 17th-century French court; when he finishes his latest novel-in-progress (about a man who seemed to have everything and dies by suicide in his 50s), the next book will be about Philippe de France, Louis XIV’s gay brother known as “Monsieur.”

A Man of Appetites

White’s other voracious appetite is for reading and, in 2018, he keeps a regular Skype book club appointment with his close friend, writer Yiyun Li. “We love our English ladies, like Elizabeth Bowen. [Li] introduced me to the novels of Rebecca West that I had never read, [like] The Fountain Overflows.”

In 2018 he published a memoir about his reading life, The Unpunished Vice, and still loves to follow his curiosity and research widely (a holdover from his 1960s stint as an editor and writer with Time-Life publications). I picture him surrounded by books in varying stages of progress, spines splayed around him, and he says that’s not far off. “They cover my bed and I have to hollow out a little space for sleeping,” he enthuses, before sharing more about his current fascinations.

One is The Grand Affair, a book on John Singer Sargent, the portrait artist of Gilded Age society. “It’s very good because it’s quite detailed and, of course, he’s one of those mysterious figures that, like Ravel, [people wondered] was he gay, was he not gay? Nobody really knows.” (White thinks yes.) Another is Caillebotte: Painting Men, because to paint men rather than women in the 19th century was radical and, at one time, White wanted to organize an exhibition of 19th-century male nudes. He greatly admired Tom Crewe’s debut The New Life “from the opening steamy pages,” and declared most of the talented new novelists (Nigerian Arinze Ifeakandu, France’s Edouard Louis) are gay. Any chance he’s writing an essay with a grand unifying theory on why that is? “I’m not,” White says brightly, “but I probably should!”