Edmund White, the author and memoirist whose extensive body of work helped shaped modern queer literature, died on June 3, 2025, at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
White wrote more than 30 books, and his work was marked by unflinching honesty and critically-appraised craft. His semi-autobiographical 1982 novel, A Boy’s Own Story, remains a touchstone of LGBTQ coming-of-age literature. The novel traced a young man’s journey of self-acceptance in the 1950s in a tale that mirrored White’s own adolescence. Its sequels included The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, and other titles helped bring gay fiction into the literary mainstream and inspired generations of queer writers.
Born in Cincinnati in 1940, White came out as a teenager, an act that led to a stint with a psychiatrist but also set him on a path of self-exploration and advocacy. He was in Greenwich Village on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn and, as he says, “all hell broke loose.”
Together with other contemporaries including Larry Kramer and Armistead Maupin, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became the literary voice for a community increasingly emboldened to proclaim its existence. He became a fierce advocate during the AIDS epidemic, and documented the disease’s impact on gay men and the broader community, both in his fiction and nonfiction. He co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, an early and influential AIDS service organization.
White was a member of The Violet Quill Club, a writers group which also included writers Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and George Whitmore. The group also had, as White writes, a “occasional visitor,” Vito Russo, a co-founder of GLAAD, “who was writing the authoritative book about homosexuals in Hollywood, The Celluloid Closet.”
White also wrote acclaimed biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, and co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, a groundbreaking manual that combined candid advice with a celebration of gay life.
White lived much of his life between New York and Paris. He is survived by his husband, Michael Carroll.
His life and his work reflected the progress of the LGBTQ movement, as White himself noted in his acceptance speech for a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, in 2019: “To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,” White said.
