\n<\/p>\n
Edmund White and friends in New York City, photographed by Slava Mogutin for \u2018Gayletter\u2019 in 2016, courtesy of the artist\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a photograph taken by Slava Mogutin in 2016, the writer Edmund White<\/a>, who died on 3 June, sits, corpulent and resplendent, in an unbuttoned black suit in front of overstuffed bookshelves. Draped by three graces, twinks in high athletic socks and underwear, butch cocksucker lingerie, he stares directly into the camera, smiling devilishly, each hand occupied by a smooth, naked leg.<\/p>\n \u2018I thought,\u2019 White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony<\/a><\/em> (1997), \u2018that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the 50s, freed in the 60s, exalted in the 70s, and wiped out in the 80s.\u2019 He was describing, as he always did, the generation of gay men of which he was a part. To his and our luck, he survived, living to be applauded in the 90s, unjustly overlooked in the 00s, and rediscovered in the 10s and the 20s by a new generation of gays for whom prophylactic antiretrovirals have brought back the industrial sexual liberation he wrote about in his novels.<\/p>\n White described that sexual liberation in some of the most extraordinary prose this side of Henry James. His early novella Nocturnes for the King of Naples<\/em>, more abstract and experimental than the novels for which he is better known, opens with several pages describing men cruising on the Christopher Street piers in New York City:<\/p>\n Congeries of bodies; the slow, blind tread on sloped steps; the faces floating up like thoughts out of ink; then trailing away like thoughts out of memory; entrances and exits; the dignified advance and retreat as an approaching car on the highway outside casts headlights through the window and plants a faint square on the wall. The square brightens til it blazes, then rotates into a trapezoid narrowing to the point of extinction, its last spark igniting a hand raised to hit a face. A new square grows on the wall but when it veers off it rears not the stunned face, nor the punishing hand \u2013 ooze on old boards, nothing else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I love to look at these sentences with writing students, teasing out the strangeness of \u2018congeries\u2019, the alliterative plosives of \u2018blind tread on sloped steps\u2019, the specificity of \u2018extinction\u2019 for the dying of the light. In a series of metaphors, White constructs the collapsing warehouses as a cathedral full of music, \u2018the waves drumming the dock in triplets of dotted eighths over the sustained crescendo-diminuendo of a passing barge\u2019, the barge\u2019s beam disturbing<\/p>\n isolated men at prayer, that man by the font (rainwater stagnant in the lid of a barrel), and this one in a side chapel (the damp vault), that pair of celebrants holding up a flame near the dome, those communicants telling beads or buttons pierced through dent, the reader number shuffling through, ignoring everything in their search for the god among us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n To write this way about cruising is to insist that faggots are people and our experiences are human: that we, like everyone else real or invented, deserve the open destiny of life. White, raised in a complex and abusive upper-class family in the Midwest, began writing about faggotry this way as a schoolboy. For decades, therapists tried to \u2018cure\u2019 his homosexuality, even as he became one of the best-known chroniclers of what he once called, in the LRB<\/em><\/a>, the \u2018non-subject\u2019 of homosexuality, \u2018endlessly fertile, ceaselessly shifting, devoid of all stable content, an invitation to musing rather than a fixed object of enquiry\u2019.<\/p>\n White insisted that non-subject was worthy of literature, and simultaneously refused to fix or define it too precisely, or to imbue it with essential goodness. It is perhaps for this reason that his work had meaning both for the generation of gay writers and thinkers influenced by the liberation politics of the 1970s and for the generations of queers who came of age during and after Aids: queers far less interested in fixing or defining sexuality than in using it to explore what Michel Foucault called the \u2018slantwise\u2019 positions it could draw through the social fabric.<\/p>\n Even in his late career, thirty years after Stonewall, the literary discourse was ambiently homophobic enough for John Updike to open a review of Alan Hollinghurst\u2019s novel The Spell<\/em> in the New Yorker<\/em> with the complaint that Hollinghurst\u2019s novels are \u2018relentlessly gay\u2019 and lack the \u2018chirp and swing and civilising animation\u2019 of \u2018a female\u2019. In gay fiction, Updike went on, \u2018nothing is at stake but self-gratification\u2019; even the most frivolous heterosexual writing, he proposed, was \u2018sacralised\u2019 by the \u2018institution of the family\u2019 and the \u2018perpetuation of the species\u2019. It is presumably such sacred bonds that Updike had in mind when he wrote, in The Widows of Eastwick<\/em> (2008): \u2018She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face \u2026 Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room.\u2019<\/p>\n Two years earlier, James Wolcott wrote in the Wall Street Journal <\/em>that The Farewell Symphony, <\/em>the third part of White\u2019s magisterial trilogy of gay life beginning with A Boy\u2019s Own Story<\/em>, But The Farewell Symphony<\/em>, which borrows its title from Haydn, is full of brilliantly specific characterisation. One character, named Butler, is described as keeping \u2018carbons of all his letters, which were obviously written with one eye on posterity, full of nature descriptions, lengthy impressions of historical monuments he\u2019d visited and reflections on current social problems, all adorned with appropriate tags from Horace or Boileau\u2019. Another, Sergio, encountered in a garden in Venice, has \u2018a big, comic smile that was out of phase with his eyes, as though he were wearing a commedia dell\u2019arte <\/em>half-mask \u2026 He had a prominent jaw and his face looked as though it were flooded with blood. Laugh lines flowed away from his eyes like the tails of colliding comets.\u2019 \u2018Interchangeable receptacles\u2019?<\/p>\n Writing these men as human beings was at the centre of White\u2019s literary project. The narrator of The Farewell Symphony <\/em>recalls: \u2018I can still remember the joy in certain quarters when the \u201cfags\u201d started to die. It was not withheld. Not at all, it was a joyous, prancing, self-righteous, far-right victory lap.\u2019 What a joy and what a gift that Edmund White survived, was embraced by a new generation of readers, and in his late years wrote a flurry of brilliant, inventive books.<\/p>\n In his last years he was also a generous mentor to a new generation of gay writers. Garth Greenwell<\/a>, who knew White well, wrote this week<\/a> that he \u2018had all the best, the gayest virtues, gliding among centuries, languages, worlds \u2026 He always knew more than you did, about everything, but he never made you feel small \u2026 Maybe that was the key to his charm, or to his legendary generosity: he could imagine the ideal version of yourself you might one day become.\u2019 This is the queer art of friendship, and White was, by all accounts, its master as well as its chronicler.<\/p>\n\n
\n