# Edmund White Born January 13, 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio; died June 3, 2025 in New York City. American novelist, memoirist, biographer, and essayist — **the single most-anthologized openly gay American literary novelist of the 1970s-2010s** and a co-founder of **Gay Men's Health Crisis** (1982). ## The Trilogy White's most-cited fiction is the loose autobiographical trilogy: - ***A Boy's Own Story*** (1982) — coming-of-age novel set in 1950s Midwest, widely considered one of the foundational American gay literary novels of the post-Stonewall era - ***The Beautiful Room Is Empty*** (1988) — sequel set in 1960s New York, leading to the Stonewall Riots - ***The Farewell Symphony*** (1997) — final volume covering the 1970s-80s AIDS-decade losses The trilogy is now one of the most-assigned bodies of work in college LGBTQ-literature curricula. ## Other Major Work - ***Forgetting Elena*** (1973), ***Nocturnes for the King of Naples*** (1978), ***States of Desire: Travels in Gay America*** (1980 — pre-AIDS ethnography of American gay communities), ***Caracole*** (1985) - ***Hotel de Dream*** (2007), ***Jack Holmes and His Friend*** (2012), ***Our Young Man*** (2016), ***A Saint from Texas*** (2020), ***The Humble Lover*** (2023) - ***Genet: A Biography*** (1993) — [[Lambda Literary]] Award winner; widely considered the definitive English-language biography of Jean Genet - ***My Lives*** (2005), ***City Boy*** (2009), ***Inside a Pearl*** (2014), ***The Loves of My Life*** (2025) — autobiographical memoirs - ***The Joy of Gay Sex*** (1977) — co-authored with Charles Silverstein; the gay-male companion to *The Joy of Sex*, distributed in millions of copies and one of the most-significant pre-AIDS gay sexual-information resources ## GMHC Co-Founder White was one of the six founding members of **[[Gay Men's Health Crisis]]** — the first AIDS service organization in the United States — in August 1982 at [[Larry Kramer]]'s apartment. His sustained AIDS-era writing across the 1980s and 1990s became one of the defining literary records of the epidemic among gay men of his generation. ## Place in the Vault White is the **most-prolific openly gay literary novelist of the second half of the 20th century in the United States** and a continuously-active member of the American literary establishment for over five decades. His co-founding of GMHC and his continuing literary AIDS-era work make him a bridge figure between the post-Stonewall gay-literary tradition and the AIDS-era direct-action tradition. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Gay Men's Health Crisis]] - [[Larry Kramer]]