Edmund White: The Loves of My Life (Remembering the Groundbreaking Gay Writer)

“I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me, it would be thousands of sex partners.”

Now 85, Edmund White—the great gay bard of elegant, evocative, invariably horny writing—is looking back on his life. It’s not the 30+ books he’s written or the profusion of literary prizes that stand out the most to him, it’s the fornication. By his estimate, he’s had sex with over 3,000 different men, the most meaningful of which are documented with exquisite detail in his new book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. 

White’s pioneering body of work, including A Boy’s Own Story and The Joy of Gay Sex (co-written with Charles Silverstein), set the standard for all of the gay writers who’ve come after him. He’s among a small group of gay writers in the 70s and 80s that forced the world to take LGBTQ+ stories seriously. 

I recently interviewed White at his home in New York City. He talks about his evolving relationship to sex, hiring his first sex worker at 16, and his new book, The Loves of My Life. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Jeffrey Masters: In the first chapter, you write, “I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me, it would be thousands of sex partners.” Is that something you’ve always been aware of?

Edmund White: Yeah. I mean, I don’t have sex anymore because I’m too old, but I used to have a lot of sex, like every day. I mean, in the 60s and 70s in New York…it was all before AIDS. I was in my 20s and 30s and sort of presentable. You know, I could go out and just pick up somebody very quickly.

JM: Was that amount of sex the norm amongst people you knew? 

EW: Yeah. That’s why I have that one man in the book saying to me, “Why so few?”, when I say I had sex with 3,000 people. And he was a contemporary of mine who probably had sex with 5,000. Most people did. I wasn’t such a horndog. 

JM: How do you calculate 3,000? 

EW: I think, well, three a week for 20 years. I’m so bad at math, but I think that adds up. 

JM: What percentage of it was good sex? 

EW: I mean, some of it was in the back of a truck or in a warehouse, so you might have ten partners there. Or at the baths, you might have ten partners, but they might come and go rather quickly. Not to say that I didn’t sometimes have really intense relationships at the baths and even repeating ones. Like every time I would go to the baths, I would see the same hot guy. Then I would get together with him again, but maybe never know his name. 

JM: How do you define good sex? 

EW: Partly it’s very passionate because you’re hungry for the other person and you find him very ideal and he fulfills your fantasies. You know, I would order up hustlers when I was writing late at night. To make myself stay in and work, I would order a hustler to come at like 3:00 in the morning, which you could in those days. You’d call the madam and you’d say, “I want a six foot two blonde top to come at 3:00 AM.”

JM: Hiring sex workers or hustlers as you call them is one of the throughlines of your book. 

EW: Yeah, it started when I was 16 with hiring hustlers.

JM: How did you find a hustler back then? This was the mid 1950s.

EW: I was spending the summer in Cincinnati with my father because my parents got divorced when I was seven and the divorce agreement said that I had to spend one weekend out of every month with him and all summer, every summer. So, I worked for him in that boiling hot city and his office was only two blocks away from Fountain Square, which was the big center of hustlers. They were all standing around, cute boys from Kentucky and they all had slick back hairs. And they were straight. You were the gay. And they only cost like $10.

JM: And one day you went over? 

EW: Many days. Every day. Like hundreds of days. And then I’d take them to a little fleabag hotel, which was something out of a film noir. You know, a neon sign with two letters missing. Kind of bed buggy. A room that the clerk knew perfectly well that you were only going to use for an hour. 

JM: Many of the sex workers you write about were not one-off experiences. You traveled the world with them. They were equally as meaningful as your other relationships.

EW: Yes. There are a lot of good things about hustlers. One is that you can get them to come over whenever you want. You can get them to leave when you want, which is important for a writer. Very important. You can get somebody if you hire them who’s above your pay grade who you would never get when you were just cruising at a regular bar. You can get some fabulous bodybuilder or some movie star handsome person, whatever you like. And the other thing is, they’ll do what you want. They know in advance what you want to do, and so they come and do it.

JM: You also write that the great disadvantage is that respectable people, including respectable gays, disapprove. But “that’s also the greatest advantage,” you say.

EW: Well, I mean, I think it’s fun to be disapproved of by prudish people. It’s good to be an outlaw. 

JM: How much money would you estimate you’ve spent on sex workers?

EW: Oh, gee. Maybe $10,000. Not very much. It could have been more. 

JM: You also write, counterintuitively, that sex has always been linked to love for you, even when it’s anonymous. Explain that for me. 

EW: Well, you know, I wrote a biography of Jean Genet. It took me seven years to write and it’s like 800 pages long, but Genet once said that he never had sex in its pure state, meaning he always had some affection for the person. It wasn’t just sex, it was always some kind of affection. And I think that’s always been true for me, too.

JM: Your husband is only mentioned a few times in passing in the book. Does he feel bad to not be more present in a book about the loves of your life? 

EW: No, no. From the very beginning, we always had a very open relationship. But I always had that with everybody. I mean, I never pretended to be faithful. I was faithful sometimes, like the first year when I was really intensely in love because I didn’t want to have sex with anybody else. But I certainly would never have submitted to the rules of relationship that you had to be faithful. Mind you, all these affairs that I write about in the book, most of them were pre-AIDS, so people weren’t so obsessed with safe sex and fidelity. 

JM: So he’s not reading and looking for his name in more chapters? 

EW: He has a live-in lover who lives here with him. I mean, we’re very free. We’re bohemians. 

JM: How did AIDS and learning that you were living with HIV change your relationship to sex? 

EW: Well, at first it just completely depressed me because everybody assumed you’d be dead within two years. I had a lover and we had gone together to be diagnosed. He was Swiss and his previous lover had died of AIDS, so he was scared. He was somebody who’d put on two condoms. We went to the Swiss doctor in the hospital and then we had to wait a month because the blood had to be sent to America to be analyzed. This was very early on, like ‘84. Early on for Europe. 

And then they wouldn’t give us the results over the phone, you had to go back to the hospital. And this horrible doctor, who was very handsome and had on $700 shoes, pointed his shoe at me and said, “You, you’re positive.” Then he pointed his shoe to my partner and said “You, you’re negative.” And that was it. No counseling, no nothing. 

My Swiss lover and I had already made plans to go to Vienna for the weekend, just for fun. And so we went to Vienna and I kept getting up and crying. He finally figured out that I was crying and that I was in the bathroom. I just said, “Well, I’m a good enough novelist to know that you’ll be very sweet about all this for like a year and then you’ll break up with me.” And that’s just what happened.

I was crying, not because I was going to die, but because we would have to break up.

JM: When did you stop feeling like you were going to die? 

EW: Well, I kept wondering why I didn’t, but then I would go and have my T cells taken and they are dangerous when they get below 200, but mine were always around 600. It turned out I was what they call a slow progressor. 

JM: You’re 85. Do you still have or desire sex? 

EW: No. I’m so old. I mean,  I don’t even get erections anymore. I don’t even jerk off anymore. Normally somebody my age who’s gay would be getting hormone shots which would restore his sex drive. But I had a heart attack and  two strokes. And if you have that heart problem, you’re not supposed to take hormones. So I don’t have a sex drive.

JM: Sex was such a big part of your life. Do you feel like part of you is missing? 

EW: Missing? Well, I mean, I write about it, like in this book. But, no. No.

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Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.

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