Fresh Air - Remembering Pioneer Of Gay Lit, Edmund White

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Edmund White, one of the most eloquent and perceptive chroniclers of gay life and culture, died June 3. He was 85. His 1982 semi-autobiographical novel, A Boy's Own Story, became an international bestseller. White wrote over 30 books, fiction and nonfiction and co-authored the guide The Joy of Gay Sex. He spoke with Terry Gross in 1985, 1994, 1997, and 2006. Jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews a new album from Amaryllis, the septet founded by guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right. Learn more at rwjf.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Edmund White, one of the most eloquent and perceptive chroniclers of gay life and culture, earlier this month on June 3rd. He was 85. As a boy in the 1950s in the Midwest he tried to cure his homosexuality. He drew upon that time of life for his 1982 book A Boy's Own Story. It became an international bestseller and the first of a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels.

When the book was republished nine years ago, Alan Hollinghurst and the Guardian described the book as quote, both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness." White wrote more than 30 books, including nonfiction, collections of essays, a national book award-winning biography of French author, John Genet, and the guide, The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-authored. We're going to listen back to portions of four of his interviews. Please be advised, there is some talk of sex, but nothing explicit.

We'll begin with Terry's 1985 interview with Edmund White. When you were first starting to write and first trying to get published, do you think that being gay was an obstacle at all? Oh, very much so. I have always written about gay themes from the time I wrote my first novel when I was 14 years old. And by the time I got into my 20s, I was writing novels with gay themes that were always rejected, partly maybe because they weren't any good. Although years later, after Gay Liberation, I would meet gay editors who had been in the closet and working for major publishers who told me that they had read my book and liked it,

but they'd been afraid to recommend it because they were afraid that people would think they were gay if they came out in favor of my book. So it wasn't until after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, the beginning of gay liberation, well after that, that I began to get published. And even so, the first book that was published, after that that I began to get published. And even so, the first book that was published, Forgetting Elena, is only gay by virtue of participating in this mysterious thing called the gay sensibility. There are no explicit gay scenes in it. Danielle Pletka After your first or second novel, you co-wrote the book, The Joy of Gay Sex. And I wonder what effect that had on your literary career, and one, because it was a self-help-oriented book about sexuality, two, because it was definitely a gay book, and

you were a novelist, best known as a novelist until then. Peter Van Doren I think that it had...it didn't pigeonhole me as a sort of self-help writer amongst gay people because what the interesting thing is if you compare the joy of sex with the joy of gay sex, you see that whereas almost all of the joy of sex for heterosexuals is about sexual positions, the joy of gay sex, about 40% of the book is devoted to lifestyle questions like coming out with your parents, sex and religion, how to write a will with your beloved that you live with who has no legal status in your life, and so on. So I think gay people understood that this was a sort of handbook about being gay and

that it dealt with coming out issues as much as it dealt with sexual positions. In fact, I think that Masters and Johnson demonstrated a long time ago that lesbians and gay men have a great deal fewer questions about their partners than heterosexual partners do because after all one's dealing with a member of the same sex. So you understand to some degree the anatomy and the physiology of the body that you're in bed with. There are fewer mysteries. You're not dealing with the opposite. You're dealing with the same. So I think that what people were looking for in that book was reassurance and guidance in terms of lifestyle rather than sexuality. Was that book a dramatic coming out of sorts for you because there was no way to keep that you were gay in the closet at all, even if you wanted to for one manuscript that you

were submitting? It was definitely a big coming out for me, but it was very, very liberating to me personally. I think that my life took a turn toward being much happier after I wrote that book because I think for the first time I really was out. I thought that I had come out years before by telling a few friends, but having come out professionally that way, I think was very liberating. I then went on to write States of Desire, which is my travel book about the United States. And I think on to write States of Desire, which is my travel book about the United States. And I think there's a kind of exuberance about that book,

a kind of confidence, which I had never really had in my writing before. And I think it's a real result of this new sense of security that I had, a new sense of having consolidated my own identity. Danielle Pletka How much of a period did you go through of feeling very insecure about being gay? I mean, did you ever go so far as to like try to convert, so to speak? Oh, absolutely. I was endlessly going out with women throughout my 20s, and I was in psychoanalysis for 12 years, and I was, I I think an unusually slow learner. I mean

I was an unusually conservative and backward person. Terry Gross speaking with Edmund White in 1985. Next let's listen to a portion of Terry's 1994 interview with him. It began with him reading from a story called Watermarked about first love. It was from his collection of short stories called Skinned Alive. There is some talk of sex, but nothing explicit. Our love worked well because Randall was the one man in a thousand who welcomed devotion,

and who, like a medieval princess, believed in it only after it had been proved by many deeds and long trials. after it had been proved by many deeds and long trials. Most men like chasing after rather than being the quarry and flee someone too obviously in love, being adored, suffocates, and gives them too little imaginative scope. Only someone unobtainable leaves enough room for dreams, inspires longing, promotes scheming, and implies arrival, whereas a quick and total conquest is the last act that abrogates all need for the preceding drama. But Randall had had enough strife at home and wanted to be cherished. I so enjoyed serving him and supporting him and listening to him that I forgot my own existence,

certainly my own uninteresting face. If I would glance at my own reflection after a long evening spent with him, I'd be offended by the reminder that such sustained communion hadn't improved my looks. I learned what a burden beauty can be. Drunk men at parties would take an instant dislike to Randall. Eventually I figured out their reasoning. I want him. He thinks he's too good for me. The bastard. He didn't want to be liked merely for his looks, but he needed to maintain them just in case." case. You know, I was thinking, reading this story about a first love, about whether, you know, you're talking about looks and whether men like to be the pursuer or the pursued. I was thinking if those kinds of things are much different when the relationship is gay

than it is from when it's straight, you know. I was identifying with you. You know what I mean? Well, I think that, I mean, some people say that the burden of being a gay man is that you're supposed to be as successful as a man and as beautiful as a woman. I mean, in other words, you have to play both roles and or ideally you're expected to. And I think a lot of gay men feel under tremendous pressure to be both successful and attractive. And it's awfully hard to be the one, but certainly to be both is rare.

You know, in the beginning of this story, you write about learning to be gay, learning certain behaviors, learning to dish, and then teaching it to others. Were there aspects of gay culture that you felt you actually learned? Oh, for sure. I mean, I think that, you know, there's a difference between being homosexual and being gay. I mean, I think homosexual is simply a question of desire for a certain kind of sexual encounter with members of your own sex.

But being gay implies a whole culture, a whole way of acting, of thinking, and it changes, of course, from decade to decade. In the case of this story, I talk about someone who's coming out in the late 1950s and who's learning from Chicago street queens how to camp and how to dish and how to... I mean, it's the sort of thing that I guess we know about now from drag queens, but then in those days was more generally acceptable in gay society. Danielle Pletka As you've gotten older, how has your idea of the ideal companion changed? Richard Hildreth Well, I think that I now prize real intimacy

more than I did before. Perhaps I didn't even know what it was. I mean, I lost my lover to AIDS this last March and his name was Hubert, he was French. I was with him for five years. And I think that in my own case, I was always afraid of intimacy with people. But when you live with someone, I mean, the last four of the five years that we were together,

we knew that he had AIDS and didn't have long to live. And when you know, when you're living with somebody that you know is not going to live very long, you give up all your fears about guarding your independence, and you just give yourself completely to somebody, just as I feel that he gave himself to me. I mean, he had been married when I met him, and he gave up his wife, his language, his country, his job to come with me when I was coming to Providence to teach at Brown University in 1990.

And so I felt like he had made a total gift of himself to me, and that's what I wanted to be able to give to him. But I think before that I had never really understood that kind of gift. I mean, I hear people today talk about codependency as though it's a bad thing, but I think in fact that's what love is. Love is codependency. It's perfectly okay to be codependent. Lila Lachman In your new collection of essays, The Burning Library, you write about the first time you

saw one of the backroom bars of Greenwich Village in 1970, and this was shortly after you got back to the village after living in Rome for close to a year. What was your reaction when you first saw that? I thought it was a little bit scary, but also terrific. I mean, it seemed to me that, I mean, now that because of AIDS, we all tend to act as though there was something abnormal and distressing and inevitably sinful about that period of promiscuity. And even the word promiscuity, of course, is one that is loaded against the people who practice it. But I think that, I think it was Susan Sontag once who said that there was only a very brief period for both men

and women, both gays and straights, when they weren't, when they were able to be sexually free. And basically, it's something that started with the...sexual freedom started with the invention of antibiotics and later the birth control pill and ended with AIDS. So in other words, let's say there's a period of 15 or 20 years when in all of human history, when people had all the necessary conditions, which include the anonymity of living in a big city, the breakdown of traditional religion, the freedom from venereal disease, the freedom from becoming pregnant through sex, when people could actually practice sex as a form of self-expression, as a form of art, as a form of pleasure, rather than as a form of economic exchange or all the other things that sex has been harnessed into serving.

I want to read an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 1983 that was originally published in Vanity Fair called Sexual Culture. And you were writing, no homosexual can take his homosexuality for granted. He must sound it, palpate it. For that reason, all homosexuals are, quote, gay philosophers, and that they must invent themselves. And then you wrote, on the other hand, no straight man stands in rapt contemplation of his straightness unless he's an ass. And so I guess, you know, like so much of your life has been given over to writing about

being gay, both in your essays and your autobiographies and your fiction. You know, I have the strange feeling that writing itself is somehow linked to homosexuality. I haven't worked this out, so I won't be able to make any sense of it. But I think it's really very odd if you think of it that...now, Time Magazine tells us this week that only one and a half percent of people are gay. So if that's true, think how very, very few homosexuals there actually are. And yet, if you look at the famous writers of this century, I mean, a huge high proportion of them are gay.

And it seems to me that there is something about writing itself, which is a way of at once participating in society, but also looking at it from an enormous distance, of at once imitating the conventions of society while having a very jaundiced eye toward them. It seems to me that that spirit which animates the work of homosexual writers like Proust, for instance, or Gide, or Genet, it seems to me that there is something fundamental. I mean, in other words, something about being gay means that you pass or can pass as an ordinary member of society, and yet you always feel different. You always feel that you're of this other race.

So it's a bit, I suppose, like a black person who looks white or a Jew who doesn't look Jewish who is passing as a Gentile or as a white person or in the case of a homosexual as a heterosexual. In other words, you're kind of double agent and you're living a different kind of life from the one you feel inside. So you think part of the reason why you became a writer was the sense of being the double agent? Definitely. I think the very, when I first began writing, it was like a kind of desperate attempt to fight off the waves of self-hatred and guilt that I think were really threatening

my sanity. I mean, when I was 14 or 15 years old, a psychiatrist told my mother that I should be put in a mental hospital and they should just throw the key away that I was unsalvageable. And I certainly was, I think, right on the edge of mental collapse. And the one thing that saved me was writing. And I went to a boarding school and I would do all my homework in the afternoon so that at night during study hall, all I would have to do for those two hours was work on my novel. So I had already finished a novel by the time I was 15, another one by the time I was 17, and I didn't write in a kind of arty way. I was writing out of a real desperate need to make sense of the world, to fight off this madness.

Let me just backtrack for a second here. I think I know what you mean, but why would a straight person who stands in rapt contemplation of his heterosexuality be an ass? Richard Hildesheim Well, it'd be like a white person sort of looking at his own body and saying, Oh, aren't I beautiful? I'm all white. I mean, you would just say, what a nitwit, you know. Whereas a black person who says black is beautiful, you can understand that because since the dominant society did,

at least until 20 or 30 years ago, find the state of being black inferior and little black girls back in those days used to buy white dolls, to say black is beautiful was a revolutionary statement. To say white is beautiful is idiotic. Danielle Pletka So it's about contemplating your difference. Yeah. I mean, in other words, I think if you're coming from a persecuted minority, you need to redefine yourself, not in the terms of the dominant society, but in your own terms, in new terms that will empower you or enfranchise you. Whereas if you are already a member of the

dominant society, to simply glory in being dominant is a fatuous. In one of your essays you write that although at some point in your career you started writing for what you perceived as a sophisticated gay reader, earlier on as a writer, you saw your audience as an older European heterosexual woman. Who was this idealized reader and why? I think it was Mrs. Nabokov. And she actually would read my writing. And when I finally met her, I finally met her years later after her husband had died. I went to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland and met her. And she was already quite deaf.

And she did the thing that deaf people oftentimes do of just doing all the talking, because that way they don't have to hear what you have to say. But I didn't mind because she also did the thing that every writer dreams of another person doing. She recited pages of my first novel, Forgetting Elena, by heart, because she, in fact, had a photographic memory. And she could just summon up whole pages of one's prose and recite them. And to have the woman to whom Nabokov dedicated every one of his novels and the muse of the

greatest writer of the century recite to you whole pages of his novels and the muse of the greatest writer of the century, recite to you whole pages of your own work was, of course, the most delicious thrill imaginable. But long before that, before I ever knew her, but when I knew that in fact she was reading my writing because she would write me notes about it, I did have her as a kind of ideal reader, and not just because I admired her husband and her and them as a couple, but also because it seemed to me like a filter to make sure that... I mean, one of the things that I sometimes don't like about contemporary gay writing is that I feel that it makes a lot of inside references that make it accessible only to other gay people. And one of the things I wanted to try to do was to write about gay

experience from the inside and in a fairly sophisticated way without any hint of apology, and yet in a way that would be totally accessible to people who weren't gay. And I don't know, I mean, once a heterosexual man in England said to me that he never had thought he'd had a single homosexual thought in his whole life, but that he had found himself getting very excited once reading one of my sex scenes between two men. And that thrilled me, not because I had managed to excite this particular man but who wasn't one of my dream people but just the idea that I had been able to communicate what that kind of desire would be like to somebody who wasn't cut out for it at all.

Well I want to thank you a lot for talking with us. Thank you. I enjoyed it as I always do. Writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1994. He died June 3rd at the age of 85. We'll hear more of his interviews after a break. And jazz critic Martin Johnson will review the new album by guitarist Mary Halvorson's Sex Tet. I'm David Bianculli and this is Fresh Air. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right. Learn more at rwjf.org. We're remembering the pioneering gay writer Edmund White. He died June 3rd at the age of 85.

He wrote more than 30 books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy that began with his book A Boy's Own Story which became an international bestseller in 1982. He also wrote an award-winning biography of French writer John Genet and co-authored the guide The Joy of Gay Sex. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund White again in 1997, he had written the third book in his trilogy, The Farewell Symphony. The book is narrated by a writer who has outlived most of his gay friends. He's looking back on the 1970s, the post-Stonewall pre-AIDS era. Terry asked Edmund White about how death affected the way he looked back at that era. Please note, later there is a discussion of sex, but nothing explicit.

One of the things I wanted to show was the 70s as it felt when we were living through it, not from a moralistic 80s or 90s point of view. In other words, it seems to me that a lot of people have been critical of the 70s and of the era of promiscuity, and they act as though it was almost a natural result that so much sexual activity would have necessarily have led to doom. But I don't believe that at all, and I tried to show that the 70s was, in its own way, a very idealistic period, not just a hedonistic one, but one in which people really, especially gays,

but also I think many feminists, were trying to get beyond traditional coupling and marriage, and were trying to have more extended patterns of relationship with other people. And that's something I find attractive and interesting. And I can imagine that if the AIDS virus was ever licked, that the gay community might easily go back to that. You write in the new book that, with the Stonewall uprising changed, was not love so much as self-esteem on which mutual

love depends. And I'm wondering how you think that sense of adventurous sex with many partners fits into the idea of self-esteem. Well, I mean, I think it's a double-edged sword. I mean, I think that oftentimes, I think at another point in the book, I say a life entirely devoted to pleasure can be melancholy and I think that's true too that that if you're really a short-range hedonist in the sense that you're out looking for another another sexual adventure every night that there that

eventually you feel sort of lonely and and perhaps unfulfilled But on the other hand, I also try to show that a lot of the so-called anonymous sex is something that people haven't really very well understood who are looking at it from the outside, that some of the most intense and even romantic nights that I ever passed were passed with people whose name I might not have known. And I think I mentioned in the book something that is in fact a true thing that I got a couple of CDs recently from a black singer who's since then become very famous. And he said, I just wanted to send you these records in memory of a perfect night that we spent together 25 years ago. And it's true, we only spent one night together. Neither of us ever forgot it. He sent me the records and I was very touched. And I

think that people have a hard time sometimes imagining that those encounters can be very intense and very, very real. There's a passage I'd like you to read from the Farewell Symphony that is about the period and about that sense of sexual mania of the period? Sure. We equated sexual freedom with freedom itself. Hadn't the Stonewall Uprising itself been the defense of a cruising place? The newer generation might speak of gay culture,

but those of us 30 or older knew the only right we wanted to protect was the right to have as many sexual encounters as possible. Promiscuity, a word we objected to since it suggested libertinage, and that we wanted to replace with the neutral word, adventuring, was something outsiders might imagine would wear thin soon enough. We didn't agree. The fire was in our blood. The more we scratched, the more we itched, except we would never have considered our desire a form of moral eczema.

For us, there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck, or a back room, and plundering body after body. There had been no radical break with the past. We'd all heard about the orgies in the Navy during World War II, but at least since I'd first come on the scene in the 1950s, three things had changed. In New York City, the cops weren't closing down our bars anymore or harassing us if we held hands on the street. We now had a slogan that said, gay is good, and we'd stop seeing shrinks in order to go straight. And there were more and more, millions more, gay men with leather jackets and gym-built bodies and low voices and good jobs.

We used to think we were rare birds. Now the statistics said that one out of every four men in Manhattan was homosexual. When we marched up Fifth Avenue every June, there were hundreds of thousands of gay men and women, many of them freaks, but the bulk of them, the regular kind of people, we liked. These were the kinds of guys I had sex with several times every week. If I had sex, say, with an average of three different partners a week from 1962 to 1982 in New York, then that means I fooled around with 3,120 men during my 20 years there. The funny thing is that I always felt deprived, as though all the other fellows must be having more sex than I. A gay shrink once told me that that was the single most common complaint he heard from

his patients, even from the real satyrs. They weren't getting as much sex as the next guy. I was so incapable of fitting my behavior into any general pattern that I would exclaim aghast, you know Liz has been married five times if my marriages had been legal they would have been legion. Nor did all this sex preclude intimacy for those who never lived through that period and most of those who did are dead. The phrase anonymous sex might suggest unfeeling sex, devoid of emotion. And yet, as I can attest, to hole up in a room at the baths with a body after having

opened it up and wrung it dry, to lie head-propped on a guy's stomach just where the tan line, bisects it, smoke a cigarette, and talk to him late into the night and early into the morning about your childhood, his unhappiness and love, your money worries, his plans for the future. Well, nothing is more personal, more emotional. Of course, the sermons I preached against love and jealousy were all the more absurd because I was so besotted by Kevin. I wanted to be his wife in the most straight list of marriages." I think that last line gets to exactly the kind of contradiction that I think runs through the book, you know, because so many of the impulses in this book seem to have contradictory

impulses sitting right next to them. And this passage you read is really in praise of multiple partners, but then the character is also really yearning for that one person. Yeah, I've always felt that in myself that when people, whenever I've had to write something about monogamy or marriage, I've always railed against it. It sort of wells up within me. And yet, it seems to me I've spent most of my life living with a single lover. So it is very contradictory. And I think most of my affairs, at least since the 1980s, have been extremely happy.

So how do you explain that contradiction? I think that there's something in me that doesn't want gay life to be simply an imitation of straight life. I think that I probably originally chose gay life to be simply an imitation of straight life. I think that I probably originally chose gay life. Well, that's absurd because I don't think anybody chooses gay life. But let's say from the very beginning, gay life was twinned in my own mind with freedom, freedom from my parents, freedom from middle class conventions, from the Midwest of my childhood. I remember when my father used to come visit me in college, the

minute he would leave, I would run out and try to pick up somebody. I mean, it was like I had to have an antidote to this heavy, dull, bourgeois world that he represented. Writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. We'll hear another of their interviews after a break. This is Fresh Air. We're remembering writer Edmund White who chronicled gay life and culture. He died June 3rd. He wrote over 30 books, including a semi-autobiographical trilogy that began with his boyhood in the Midwest. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund White again in 2006,

he had written the autobiography, My Lives. They started with a short reading from the chapter, My Shrinks. White's mother was a child psychologist, and when he was a child, she sent him to psychologists. He wrote that when he was 15, he stopped thinking of homosexuality as being interestingly artistic and saw it as a problem to be overcome. Already, I hoped to be a writer, but as I was beginning to realize, successful writing

entailed a grasp of universal values and eternal truths, which were necessarily heterosexual. Foolishly, I had imagined I could transform the dross of homosexuality into the gold of art. But now I saw I could never be a great artist if I remained ignorant of the classical verities of marriage and child-rearing adultery and divorce. But if psychoanalysis could convert me into a heterosexual, might it not at the same time ablate the very neurosis that made me want to write? Should I tamper with my neurosis?

That's Ed White reading from the first chapter of his new autobiography, My Lives. Ed, welcome back to Fresh Air. The first psychologist who you knew was your own mother, who she became a child psychologist when you were young, and she practiced on you. The way you described it, she practiced administering Rorschach tests on you and psychoanalyzing you. Was there anything inappropriate to you about that looking back? Well, looking back, yes. At the time, of course, you know, you don't really judge your parents that much, but now looking back, yes, at the time, of course, I, you know, you don't really judge your parents that much. But now, looking back, yes, of course, I realized it was very crazy and that

it wasn't, I mean, if your mother says to you, you have severe psychological problems and you're seven or eight years old, that's not an objective piece of information for you, the child. It becomes something that shapes you and damages you and makes you lose your confidence in yourself and feel that you're very weird. And that certainly is the way I felt. Are you describing what actually happened that she told you this and that was how you reacted? Yeah. I mean, she did really want to test me all the time. For instance, I remember she gave me a Rorschach and she was very dismayed because I didn't see any human beings in it.

I only saw gravestones and diamonds and totally weird impersonal things. Maybe quite correctly she saw that as a sign of a kind of borderline psychosis. I mean, I certainly was a very disturbed child, partly because I felt enormously guilty about my parents' divorce. And soon after they did get divorced, I locked myself in the bathroom and I wouldn't come out and I kept screaming, I did it, I did it, I did it. I mean, it's almost like a classic example of an edible complex where the boy wants to get rid of the father and then when he does he feels terribly guilty. Were most of the psychologists you were sent to when you were young because you were gay or there are other reasons why your mother sent you to psychologists or that you wanted to see

psychologists. Oh, it was because I was gay and it was mostly I I was the one who initiated all this. I mean I I I think I had you know Sartre talks about people who have bad faith an act of bad faith that that is They're not being honest with themselves And I think I was a classic example of that kind of bad faith, because on the one hand, I was lusting after boys my own age and even older men, and that's what I really wanted, and I was obsessed with that idea of having some sort of sex with older people. But on the other hand, I knew that it was a bad thing, and I also knew that it would limit me as a writer, because that was very much the idea in the air, that

a writer could only be successful if he could touch on universal topics. And homosexuality was obviously too narrow a focus or too neurotic a point of view to ever make a successful writer. So for various reasons, some of them artistic already, even at that early age of 14, 15, but also just because I wanted to be a regular guy. I mean, teenagers do want to be like other teenagers and it's really hard to perceive that you're different. Is there anything that really surprises you about what has happened with gay culture since Stonewall? I mean, you were

you were active in the gay rights movement, you know, back then and you've watched gay culture evolve, gay life evolve. What surprises you most? Well, I think in the 70s that most gay leaders, the visible active leaders politically, were leftists. And it's because I think people who were conservative and gay felt they had nothing to gain by coming out, at least in a political way. So the gay movement was quite radical and progressive, and there was a tremendous emphasis on linking up the gay fight with the fight of women, of blacks, and of other minority groups. I think that that isn't the case anymore, that what happened in the 80s was AIDS killed off a lot of those radical leaders and flushed out of the closet a lot of more conservative

middle-class people who sort of took over the movement, and I think that's fine, but it has meant that the whole movement as a political movement has drifted very much to the right, as has the whole culture. And in the same way, I think that gays used to feel they had to be cultured, that the most important thing about proving that you were eligible for gay culture was to have an opinion about Maria Callas or to have seen the latest Pasolini movie or to have read the latest Andre G journal. Now, there's very little pressure to do that. And I think that gay culture has been dumbed down the way the rest of the culture has been dumbed down, and that gays feel that the most important thing is to go to the gym

and look great, or maybe have a very good job. But I'm, of course, exaggerating slightly because maybe the final thing to say about difference between now and the past is that gay cultures become extremely pluralistic so that you have many people who are skinny and don't go to the gym and who are artistic and live in the East Village, and you have many people who live in Chelsea where I live who have these big showboat bodies and go to the gym and are mostly interested in that. And you have gays of absolutely every stripe and variety. And you have many, many people who don't define themselves by their sexuality anymore. I mean, it's quite common for me to meet a younger person who, after I've known him for a few weeks or months even, I'll find out sort of in passing that he is gay. But that isn't the most important thing for him

about his identity. Whereas I think in an earlier period of oppression, it was very important to everybody's identity. You were diagnosed as being HIV positive back in 1985. I'm wondering how having that kind of cloud hanging over your head of being HIV positive has affected your life. You know, because you probably thought at one point that that was an early death sentence. I definitely did, yeah.

And, you know, thank goodness it turned out not to be. But you didn't know that. So did you make changes in your life based on the fact that you thought that you might not have long to live? Well, I think it's made me very productive. I mean, I think that I'm very grateful for every year that has been granted me. And so many of my contemporaries died. I mean, I belonged to a writer's group called the Violet Quill and there were eight of us, and only three of us are still alive. And so I think, you know, I sometimes feel that I'm writing the books they might have written, or I'm

expressing the things that otherwise would be lost. Anyway, I do feel very grateful about having been given this extra lease online. Well, Ed White, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you, Terry. I enjoyed it so much. Edmund White spoke with Terry Gross in 2006. He died June 3rd at the age of 85. If you want to hear more of our interviews with him, please go to our online Fresh Air archives. Coming up, jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews the new

recording by guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson. This is Fresh Air. Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson arrived on the jazz scene in the mid-2000s with a unique sound on her instrument. It was more slithery than stinging and was abetted by electronic loops. Her style was unmistakable and her virtuosity commanded attention. In the past 10 years or so, she's also been building a formidable reputation as a composer. Her current sextet, which she calls Amaryllis, the name of their first recording three years ago,

features a stellar cast of musicians. Jazz critic Martin Johnson says that on their latest album, About Ghosts, you can hear some of the defining trends of jazz in the 2020s. In the past few years, guitarist Mary Halvorsen has split her time between intimate settings, such as her duet with the extraordinary pianist Sylvie Courvassier, and the collective trio Thumbscrew, and mid-sized groups like her band Code Girl and her Amaryllis sextet. The larger ensembles often sound orchestral due to Halvorson's arrangements. That song we just heard, carved from, may remind you of classic mid-60s horn voicings.

This one, Polyhedral, recalls Henry Threadgill's Shifting Grooves. Halvorson formed Amaryllis shortly after winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 for a one-off engagement in Brooklyn where she lives. She assembled a band filled with players she admired. Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Nick Dutton, drummer Toma Fujiwara, trombonist Jacob Garchik, and trumpeter Adam O'Farrill. But the pandemic forced the cancellation of that performance. In the quiet months that followed, she kept writing for the band and it was signed to Nonesuch Records. Tours followed and instead of a one-off, this ensemble of all-star contributors

became a stellar working unit with deep rapport and intuitive interplay. They improvised much of this intro to full neon after playing it on the road. For About Ghost, Halvorson expanded the group, inviting tenor saxophonist Brian Settles and alto saxophonist Emanuel Wilkins to play on several tracks. The expanded group, with its four horns, recalls Halvorson's octet from about ten years ago, but her writing has become much more intricate. There are layers of sound, different instruments melding and disconnecting, solos emerge less from a pas de baton sequence than a lead voice emerging from a like-minded chorus, such as O'Farrell here on Amor in theme. Notice the little bit of the standard my ideal, a song once sung by Bing Crosby in O'Farrell's solo.

There's a bit of that kind of musicalogical shoutouts on this recording. Halverson's intro to her event title sounds a bit like Monk's Mood, and the title track is an homage to a piece written by contemporary guitar great Liberty Elman. There's a lot of merging of seemingly disparate influences and references going on in jazz these days. Artists are drawing their own lineages through the music's glorious history and coming up with music that's new but not rootless. To that end Halverson wrote the album's ending, and most with jazz standards in mind. Martin Martin Johnson writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal and Downbeat. He reviewed About Ghosts, the new album from Mary Halvorson and her sextet Amaryllis.

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