GLR November-December 2025

if I say that Ed, celebrated as a fiercely committed champion of gay rights, never entirely rid himself of a pronounced disapproval of his own orientation. This contradiction is resolved once you know what it was like to grow up in America’s fag-bashing 1950s, an atmosphere that scarred everyone who lived through it. The distinctly negative depiction of gay experience in Ed’s nov els, elaborated in relentless detail, can be paradoxically under stood as an argument for acceptance, tolerance, and affirmation. The notable exception to Ed’s mostly humdrum letters was one he wrote to Ann and me describing the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village in June of 1969. I’d been a few times to the Stonewall earlier in the spring, but that summer Ann and I were staying at her mother’s out in Oregon. Ed’s well-written letter about what happened may not be entirely factual, but it is entertaining and has been quoted in several histories of the Gay Liberation movement. He couldn’t be blamed, so early, for not realizing that what he saw as a camp event would prove pivotal in LGBT history. Activism became more important for him in the ’70s than it had been before. Ed’s collaboration with Charles Silverstein on The Joy of Gay Sex was part of that, though at the time I disapproved. Not of the book itself, but that Ed, a literary writer, not a commercial one, was the co-author, soiling his singing robes in the pop-cul ture marketplace. But the fact is that book performed a valuable social service, helping tens of thousands of fearful gay people to accept themselves and come out. No doubt the sex techniques described were the upshot of a lot of first-hand experiences. Let me backtrack a bit and explain how Forgetting Elena came to be published. A friend of Ed’s had met the poet and translator Richard Howard and thought the two were likely to hit it off. An introduction led to an important literary friendship for Ed—and for me. Ed soon introduced me to Richard, who was an important early influence. Specifically, I stopped at tempting to write fiction and went back to poetry, my first love, not returning to fiction until the 1980s. Richard had notable con tacts in the publishing world and eventually took Ed’s novel to editor Anne Freedgood at Random House. She accepted and brought out the book in 1973. Ed had it sent to Nabokov, one of his idols, and here is what seems to have happened. The seigneurial Russian-American author added it to the stack of books recently sent to him, where his wife Vera found it, read it, and praised it to her husband. Nabokov, who took all his wife’s opinions seriously, picked up the book and decided he liked it too. Shortly afterward, in an interview published in Es quire, he was asked if there were new authors he liked, and he mentioned Edmund White. That was the beginning of Ed’s ac ceptance as a notable writer by the New York literary commu nity. But a succès d’estime was never enough for Ed. He also wanted to be famous. The Joy of Gay Sex contributed to that as did the realistic novel A Boy’s Own Story, which was more ac cessible than his first two experimental novels. Finally, his non fiction book States of Desire: Travels in Gay America set the seal on his fame. I say “nonfiction,” but I know a lot of it was invented, sometimes by a mix-and-match method of people, in cidents, and locations. The point was to make the thing inter esting, not to restrict himself to factual reportage. It was around this time that he took the job of director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he met and became friendly with Susan Sontag. They got along November–December 2025

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