Edmund White / A Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover

 

A Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover

“Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” by Edmund White, stands outside current fashions, with its refined pleasures and its nuanced accounts of gay lives.

By Garth Greenwell

May 28, 2024

Edmund White’s “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” opens with the most remarkable account of cruising I know. By cruising I mean a specifically gay male practice of organized promiscuity, a form of sexual sociality at once universal—existing, in remarkably similar forms, in rural American truck stops and among Roman ruins—and, as White chronicles it, specific to a particular time and place, the Chelsea piers in nineteen-seventies New York, part of the extravagant, unprecedented gay world that flourished between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the onset of the aids crisis. In the nighttime scene that opens the book, men brush past each other in the dark, alert in their animal bodies, their senses sharpened by hunger; they send up cigarette flares, displaying themselves against the night sky; they pair off or remain solitary, unchosen—like the narrator, who lingers until sunrise, when finally he finds a man to go home with.

Edmund white / ‘Our Young Man’ Reframes a 19th-Century Work in the 1980s

 

Edmund White.Credit...Ethan Hill for The New York Times

A WORD WITH: EDMUND WHITE

‘Our Young Man’ Reframes a 19th-Century Work in the 1980s

By Joshua Barone

• April 4, 2016

Edmund White is one of the pre-eminent chroniclers of modern gay life, yet he often follows assured comments with self-deprecating caveats. Earned wisdom comes with “But why should you listen to my advice?,” and he is quick to say that plot isn’t his strong point.

Edmund White / The Guy Who Wrote the Bible on Gay Sex

 

Edmund White

The Guy Who Wrote the Bible on Gay Sex

Edmund White's memoirs set the scene for queer America in the 20th century. At 85, he's still got lots to say about who and how we fuck.

For over fifty years, Edmund White has been the foremost chronicler of gay life. In his memoirs, novels and essays, the American writer has documented its shifting landscape. In 1982’s A Boy’s Own Story, he wrote about growing up in the repressive American midwest of the 1950s, while City Boy (2009) dealt with the post-Stonewall liberation of 1970s New York. He also spent sixteen years in Paris, mixing with everybody from Yves Saint Laurent to Michel Foucault, as detailed in 2014’s Inside a Pearl.

Obituaries / Edmund White

 

Edmund White

Obituaries

Edmund White obituary

One of the leading gay writers of his generation known for his bestseller A Boy’s Own Story and his biography of Jean Genet

Eric Homberger

Wed 4 Jun 2025

Edmund White was present in June 1969 when the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar in Manhattan, New York. Shouts of “gay power” were heard as bartenders, hat-check boys and the owners were hauled off in vans. At first it seemed an unexpected laugh, and then the men milling round in the street started to resist the police and their billy clubs. It was the moment when gay militancy was 

White, who has died aged 85, went on to become one of the most prominent gay writers of his generation, but by temperament he was not a blazing militant. His sensibility was that of a midwestern Marcel Proust, and he did not do anger. An evening spent cruising the gay bars, or chatting about the New York literary scene with the gay writers who formed the Violet Quill group, was more his style.

Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85

 

Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85

The American essayist, playwright and author of books including A Boy’s Own Story and The Married Man has died

Sian Cain

Wed 4 Jun 2025

Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted acclaim for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy’s Own Story – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died aged 85.

 

Edmund White in Paris in 1986.
Photo by Ulf Andersen

Where to start with

Where to start with: Edmund White

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction

Neil Bartlett

Wednesday 4 June 2025

Edmund White, who has died aged 85, was born in Cincinatti, to conservative, homophobic parents. Although he soon rejected almost all his family’s cultural values, he retained their work ethic: White published 36 books in his lifetime, and was working on a tale of queer life in Versailles when he died.

Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’

 

Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’

Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones and more recall the high style and libidinous freedom of a writer who ‘was not a gateway to gay literature but a main destination’

Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Tóibín, Adam Mars-Jones, Olivia Laing, Mendez, Tom Crewe and Seán Hewitt

Wed 4 Jun 2025 15.04 BST

Last modified on Wed 4 Jun 2025

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White review – a glorious celebration of queer love

This article is more than 4 months old

In frank and hilarious style, the author recounts the significant encounters that helped make him who he is

Ralf Webb

Wed 22 Jan 2025

In this, Edmund White’s sixth memoir, the American novelist and critic observes that a universal prudishness about sex sits alongside the fact that it is constantly on our minds. Sex, White writes, with the nonchalant wisdom that runs throughout this book, is “a language one speaks” that is both “communal and isolating”. Transcribing the vocabulary of sex – especially sex between men – has been White’s lifelong literary project, most famously in the semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches the task with refreshing candour. The result is something like an erotic almanac, charting the shifting sexual mores and conventions of gay life through seven decades, from the “oppression of the 1950s” to the “brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled ‘woke’”.