< Edmund White, who broke ground in gay literature, has died at 85

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

One of the most important figures in American gay literature has died. Edmund White helped usher in a wave of literary coming-out fiction with his 1982 novel "A Boy's Own Story." White died yesterday in New York City. NPR's Neda Ulaby has our remembrance. And a warning, this story includes a discussion of sex and sexual situations.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Edmund White did not really mind getting labeled as a gay writer, as he told NPR in 2002.

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EDMUND WHITE: You know, everything in America is niche marketing.

ULABY: Maybe he was not as popular as mainstream peers like John Updike or Philip Roth...

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WHITE: But when you write for a minority group, you're sort of essential to them.

ULABY: When "A Boy's Own Story" came out, he said, there were no openly gay movie stars or national politicians. Gay people could still lose jobs or kids because of their sexual orientation. White had already written a couple of well-received novels and co-wrote a book called "The Joy Of Gay Sex." For "A Boy's Own Story," he wanted to write something other gay men would recognize. He drew on his own well-off Midwestern childhood and adolescent sexuality.

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WHITE: I was lusting after boys my own age and even older men, and I was obsessed with that idea of having some sort of sex with older people.

ULABY: That's White on WHYY's Fresh Air in 2006. His main character saves up to pay, in White's words, a hustler for sex. It is not, says White's biographer, Nicholas Radel, a sentimental effort to sanitize the feelings or actions of a gay teenager in the 1950s.

NICHOLAS RADEL: And that book famously ends with the young narrator having sex with the teacher and then turning him into the school authorities for smoking marijuana.

ULABY: This book is part of a canonical trilogy of autobiographical novels among more than 30 novels and memoirs Edmund White wrote over his life.

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DAVID SEDARIS: I saw him do a reading in Paris, and he was reading from a memoir that he wrote.

ULABY: Bestselling humorist David Sedaris talked about Edmund White on Fresh Air in 2013.

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SEDARIS: And I could not believe how frank he was. I just - I mean, a lot of people in the audience were just horrified.

ULABY: But Sedaris was impressed.

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SEDARIS: I really admired him, and I really - he's such a good writer, too. And they were beautifully written. I mean, the writing was bigger than the sex.

ULABY: White, like so many LGBTQ people of his generation, was transformed by the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. He was there in New York, working as an editor for Time-Life Books. He told NPR he walked by the bar with a friend when it was raided by the police.

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WHITE: And then pretty soon, we had mixed in with the melee. Everybody remembers it as being terribly solemn because it was sort of like our Bastille Day. But the truth is, everybody was laughing. We'd been so oppressed for so long that the idea of claiming our rights seemed vaguely humorous to us.

ULABY: Later, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Edmund White helped found the New York-based Gay Men's Health Crisis, the first social service group in the country for people living with HIV and AIDS. The writer had moved to Paris by the time he discovered he was HIV-positive in 1985. He never expected to live as long as he did. White was part of a group of other gay writers, all men, who called themselves the Violet Quill. He told Fresh Air many of them died of AIDS.

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WHITE: I sometimes feel that I'm writing the books they might have written or I'm expressing the things that otherwise would be lost or - anyway, I do feel very grateful about having been given this extra lease on life.

ULABY: Edmund White died of natural causes, according to his agent. He was 85 years old. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

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