Acclaimed Author Edmund White’s New Memoir Holds Nothing Back

February 28, 2025
HANK ORSO

"Who reads anymore?

It's a joking statement I hear in TV and movies, but never in real life. Yer boy Hank here is a member of no less than three online book clubs and one in real life. "Silent Read" book clubs are fantastic! Find your local one today! It seems everyone around me is some level of avid reader, whether it's working through both a physical tome and an audiobook in the car, like me, or several books concurrently, picked off a pile for whatever suits one's mood, like my buddy Molly. Even the young people I work alongside, the ones you'd think would only be glued to their phone screens, I often see with their noses in a book in the break room. But probably not this one! "This one" being the latest memoir from prolific and acclaimed gay writer Edmund White. The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir is the most aptly titled book to come down the pike. Or should I say, cum down the pike.. Because, dear lord, this octogenarian has zero fucks to give, and lets it all hang out!

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To say that White has lived a life full of adventure, joy, sorrow and sex is, to put it mildly, an understatement. But be prepared as you dive into this short, quick sexcapade. He is not going to take you by the hand, chronologically, year by year, and recount and philosophize and dream about a life long past. He's already published at least three other memoirs focusing on various aspects of his storied life: from his childhood with his troubled family, to living in NYC in the 60's and 70's, to Paris, to his own history with books and reading. And many of his over thirty books, including cherished novels, are autobiographical in nature, such as his early and much-loved A Boy's Own Story in which he relates of his early adolescence and adulthood in suburban 1950's America up[ through the 60's and the Stonewall Riots.

Here, structurally, White jumps all over the place, like a man recounting his loves over a long evening's conversation with friends as they get more and more drunk. It can be a bit jarring if you're more attuned to a timeline of retelling. Here's it's more thematic. He introduces you to great loves and part-time lovers, to one-night stands and those hot and heavy romances that petered out quickly. And all the pick-ups and public pairings in bathrooms and empty warehouses and theaters in between.

Photographed in 2015 with...friends.

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White's language is graphic, unrefined, blunt and honest. He's not trying to sugarcoat and wax poetic about his encounters, or paint a more beautiful picture as he relates the basic logistics of men fucking. It's all about cocks and holes and "pussies." Unclean butts and funky smells happen. The unpretty moments are on grand display. It's unrelentingly forward and impolite as he recounts the trheats of violence and orgies and getting off in the bushes and in covert locations literally all over the world.

If you pick up this book, your sentiments and feelings and weirdly gay conservative need for language policing will not be spared.

We both competed for it like seals begging for fish. I make it sound comical but it was as serious as a christening.

Yes, the above passage is regarding clamboring for dick and jizz, telling a tale of he and others blowing one well-hung young man.

He may have grown up in the staid and conservative 50's, but even as a teen he seemed to be getting a lot of dick, even if he paid for it. His stories about paying five or ten dollars to blow a straight guy in a car seem surprisingly numerous, and not painful memories. He comes across as if most of these encounters all added up to a life worth living and examining. Regrets? He seems to have none.

I’ve been with my darling husband 20 years, possibly because we acknowledged right away that we were both sluts.

This is the gayest photo you will ever see. White, with Truman Capote, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe.

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As Alexandra Jacobs writes in her review in the New York Times, this memoir "is gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender: a guided tour of a foreign land....where libido is the wellspring of just about everything. It’s far from a solemn capstone to White’s long and distinguished career. More like a mischievous rock-skipping in the moonshadow."

White has tales to tell and he's not afraid of offending anyone. And while White isn't afraid to drop a reality bomb here and there, such as passing references to his Klansman grandfather or his relation to the racist senator Strom Thurmond, or that his sister, nopw happy and working on her own memoir, was once impregnated by his father, these passages do not bog down the rest of the narrative. They are simply additions to the other dangers that permeate this book, as Jacobs points out: from being discovered in the 50's and 60's, to post-Stonewall drug-fuled hedonism, to his friends dropping dead through the 80's (White discovered his own positive status in 1985) to the "dashed promise of the internet."

But keep in mind, this guy is still a randy old coot. His chapter "Pedro" tells of one visceral lover who picked him up on the Silver Daddies site! Twist his nipples and he'll tell you even more.

In Venice, 1989

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As Ms. Jacobs points out, White's memoir, published late last month, packs a provocateur's wallop in these increasingly restrictive and repressive times. This is the type of writing that was once banned, and may be again. Read it with the voracious need from which it springs. Then go check out the rest of his catalogue.