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How I’ll Remember Edmund White
Books and boys and big dinners at home.
Not AIDS, not negative reviews, not heartbreak (a breakup a few years back with a long-term Italian boyfriend brought him to the brink), not the two strokes a decade ago or the heart attack in 2014 (he collapsed in his office at Princeton; the writer A.M. Homes pounded on his chest until the ambulance arrived). Ed liked to tell stories of picking up Kentucky hustlers at the age of 15 in Cincinnati’s Fountain Square, which was sadly no longer an option for me at 15, terrified of being gay in the city’s post–Charles Keating, “morally cleaned-up” environment of hyperconservatism. The majority of his remembrances involved young gay men, much like those who gathered around his armchair or whose beds we’d often just crawled out of — the seekers, strivers, idealists, depressives, failed actors, orphaned lost boys, tragic artists, ambitious grad students doubling as outer-borough rent boys, day-job drudgers with a certain spring in their steps, a blond with a drug problem on the run from his Mormon parents, a hot Colombian playwright who would die on a subway track — an entire unbridled, rowdy community of gay men knitted together in the span of time between July 19, 1962, when Ed first arrived in Manhattan, and 7:25 p.m. on Tuesday, when he took his last breath.
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