How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers

NEW YORK – Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out.

Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, “A Boy's Own Story.”

“I’d never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,” says Greer, whose “Less” won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. "I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more.

“Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life," he said. "Ed invented so many of us."

White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others.

Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: "How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,” says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, “ The Prophets,” was a National Book Award finalist in 2021.

Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read ”A Boy's Own Story." He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, “the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,” he said.

“It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god’s vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'” Jones added.

“It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn’t divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated," he said.

Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a response to the 1970s bestseller “The Joy of Sex." He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle.

“White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,” said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was “one way of honoring that support.”

Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included “The Prophets,” Myriam Gurba 's “Dahlia Season” and Joe Okonkwo's “Jazz Moon.” Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's “ Cinema Love,” a story of gay men in rural China.

Tang remembered reading “A Boy's Own Story” in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were “essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.”

“He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,” Tang said. "He’s a towering figure. There’d be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.”