The sexual escapades of Edmund White

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, “no one ‘came out’ except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner,” he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of twelve, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic candor has always been a political act, at least in part — never merely profligate.

Even so, there is a gleeful lack of restraint to the real-life stories that make up this joyously meandering account of the love affairs, hook-ups and clinches of White’s long life. “I’ve hired men for sex all my life,” begins a chapter titled “Hustlers,” in which the eighty-five-year-old traces the dynamics and lurid details of numerous such encounters. They range from the dumb priapism of the “hillbillies” he picked up as a middle-class teenager to the appetites of jobbing “masseurs” in the internet era. “In the early 1980s I would hire countless men in a Cretan village,” he recalls. “It was paradise. Everyone was available for a price, even the mayor.”

Each chapter has the air of an intimate monologue — ruminative, gossipy and intermittently comedic, however melancholy or abject the revelations. That sense of an unanswered soliloquy perhaps says something about White’s mode of loving: “For me, love was always passionate and one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual.” Judgments are usually borne of his own experience: he has a rare capacity for tilting towards the philosophical without becoming sententious.

The book progresses in nonlinear fashion, looping in time, jumping between settings. It soon becomes impossible to maintain a clear chronology of White’s affairs, many of which presumably overlapped. The narrative is truer to memory, in this regard, than a date-specific history. Lovers coexist in the mind, as do the many experiences — the lives — that make up a life. Some chapters focus loosely on individual lovers or sex friends (“Stan,” “Rory”); others are more miscellaneous, ambling between reminiscences on a theme — Kabuki, say, or sadomasochism. A chapter titled “Strange Places” is more or less a catalogue of the cruising spots of yesteryear: byways in Venice, public gardens on the Île Saint-Louis, the Colosseum in 1970.

‘I would hire countless men in a Cretan village. Everyone was available for a price, even the mayor’

What lifts The Loves of My Life above the level of scurrilous confession for its own sake is White’s ability to weave his erotic or romantic escapades into the wider scenarios of his life and his cultural moment. These might be the cruising scene of 1970s New York (remembered as an Edenic moment between liberation and Aids) or the Stonewall riots that marked the origin of the modern gay rights movement. Sex is a way of existing in the world, not a private retreat.

A deadpan humor pulses through the account. Events, even relatively recent ones, are witnessed from a droll remove; and this has a way of damping down – without quite effacing — their poignancy or painfulness. White narrates the gruesome facts of forced sex at the hands of one Englishman and his escapades with another on Hampstead Heath with the same nonchalance. At times he seems unable to avoid — or resist — a burlesque register, something approaching an improbably sordid Carry On film. He is merciless in lampooning his own submissive inclinations, picturing himself crawling naked across the floor, “as big and awkward as Mr. Snuffleupagus in Sesame Street,” while a “Scot, Robert was his name, sat on a high stool next to the fireplace and folded back the panels of his kilt.”

White’s sheer overtness sets the book apart, highlighting how far ethical squeamishness has entered into discussions or portrayals of sex in contemporary writing. He is capable of a remark, a mere turn of phrase, that would antagonize or offend in certain quarters. Paying for sex, he contends with sangfroid, is no more of a transaction than that “between employer-employee, rich husband-dependent wife, professor-student” — only “cleaner, more straightforward, more consensual.”

White’s novel A Previous Life (2022) centered on a couple reading each other’s flagrant sexual confessions, and explicitness regarding sex — a “more is more” sensibility — has been a defining aspect of his writing for decades. For some, this latest book might feel obsessive in its detail. In it, as throughout his career, White has made sex a governing theme in a way that few writers dare to: not a high-stakes interlude but a pervasive fact of life (his life, especially). As he puts it, with characteristic wryness: “A job is just a refractory period between orgasms; socializing is just a tease, a delay before serious fucking.”

In any event, what makes White and the stories he tells so likable is his indifference to the judgments of others, in tandem with an acerbic (often merciless) appraisal of himself. He tells of a young friend who used to recount his own erotic exploits to White over the internet on a nightly basis. Then he remarks:

I’m sure my American readers… are groaning about how I could ‘exploit’ this youth and complaining of how perverted this sounds. What more do they expect of a pervert?