What a difference a gay makes

Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is imbued with his preferred subject, homosexuality.

Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is imbued with his preferred subject, homosexuality. Now he is most famous for what could be termed his boy-ographies, a regular series of volumes about his passions, practices, predilections and peccadildos, beginning, in 1975, with The Joy of Gay Sex. Next came States of Desire: Travels in Gay America — which might more appropriately have been titled ‘Straights I Desire’. The Burning Library was another book on his favourite theme.

Rather like a male version of Sybille Bedford’s labyrinthine autobiographical technique, one of White’s early, and critically acclaimed, novels, A Boy’s Own Story, was a roman à clef of his growing-up-queer life; later this fiction became fact in My Life: A Memoir.