Edmund White is one of the most prolific and esteemed writers of his generation of post-liberation, gay writers. His novels ‘A Boy’s Own Story,’ ‘The Beautiful Room is Empty’ and ‘The Fairwell Symphony,’ all articulatulating the journeys that gay men experienced pre-and post Stonewall and through the turbulent 80s as the profound impact of AIDS came into view. White is also a fine biographer, his magisterial biographies of French writers Marcel Proust, Artur Rimbaud and, especially artist Jean Genet are exemplar of the biographer’s craft.
Among his most famous books from his early career are ‘The Joy of Gay Sex and ‘States of Desire: Travels in Gay America’ both celebrating gay sexuality in all of its humanity and well, glory. Now in his 80s, he is as randy as ever in print and in life as debriefed in his latest book ‘The Loves of My Life’ A Sex Memoir.’ A balls-out romp that manages to shock in unexpected ways, and not because of its expected explicit sex, but more for its rambling narrative abandon.
White’s fiction is always autobiographical to some degree. He started exploring, and writing, about his sexuality in his teens and populating his books with roman a clef characters of his past and present relationships with longtime lovers, and short time trysts with hustlers, trade, ex-boyfriends, serial ex-boyfriends, transit pickups, orgies goers, backroom johnnies, sex clubers, etc. though, he notes always avoided the risks of the Hudson piers.
Intriguingly in ‘The Loves’ he explains that his pick-ups and one night stands have over the years, often turned into fuller relationships. He fondly reminisces about his first serious relationship with an aspiring actor prone to depression nevertheless continued for eight years of loving open relationship that allowed for recreational sex.
On one recent date he ordered over the phone (through online entrepreneur ‘Madam’) was billed as a husky fireman, with or without a uniform on, he cost $100 arrived on time at 2:30. It was such a good sex, that the hustler asked Edmund if he wanted to go on a date, no charge. The episode had such predictable but believable charm.
The opening chapters of ‘Loves’ have humor, heart, and prose agency, but that energy only flares and fizzles through much of the book. It statically sinks into a laundry list of sexual aerobics and any charm literary gets the bums rush (no pun in…never mind); anyway, nothing wrong with that per se, but White’s obsessive details get clammy soon enough.
In a chapter titled Mini-Stories, White writes he had been the victim of rape, but so passingly it seems grotesquely misplaced in a chapter about the S/M scene, described in such an exhaustive litany of descriptives that you get the sense that even he was bored writing about it. I certainly was, reading it.
There are of chapters without any vestige of a discerning filter, and at some point you think, ‘what is the point other than an excuse to be down and dirty.’ White doesn’t see it that way, writing in a preface “I’ve always insisted I’ve approached sex as a realist, not as a pornographer. That is, I like to represent what goes on at through someone’s mind while having sex.”
Well, that fine-line distinction without a difference is lost in passages that are at the very least can be called forensically lurid.
At various points in the book, White admits to being a sex addict who needs treatment. That admission somehow seems more shocking than the sex. In his 30s,he was so self-loathing about it, he pursued conversion therapy and moves into a new apartment to start his new life as a straight man, a new man. ( but, alas later that day, as he was strolling on the piers by chance, contemplating his new life he turned and suddenly….)
So, what is this ‘sex memoir’ in a literary context from an esteemed author really about- Is it an homage or parody of de Sade, is it a public submission pact of some sort, maybe revenge on his repressed childhood or just a need to write graphic erotica laced with sorrow and the occasional joke that land like dated schtick. For that he gets a senior pass, but it’s worth noting that White is too self-aware not to know when he is being boorishly provocative.
He doesn’t get a pass on the frequent though on specious comments about gay life, reeking with the scent of self-loathing, however retro contextualized.
And then out of the blue, White hits you with such unguarded sincerity that gives a glimpse of the author’s self-reflection, that it almost makes White’s sex carnavale worth the mind numbing ride- as in this passage late in the book.
“Once, when I was sobbing in public over my broken heart over some man or another, Joyce Carol Oates, friend and colleague at Princeton, asked me cooly, how many men? Had rejected and hurt? Of course, in my egotism I haven’t kept track of that, though they must have been. In the dozens. Before me, love was always her, passionate and one sided, aspirational, and impossible, never domestic, and mutual.”…”I kept wondering what I must have said. It was always about me, some lack or evil or mistake in me, my failure to be lovable. And now, in the cold polar heart of old age, I look at my travels. Love is comical and pointless, repetitious, and dishonorable.”
One wonders if these are just passing thoughts or intimate revelations by the author. Whatever White’s literary intent amidst so much porny verite, you get the feeling that there is some naked truth unrevealed.
