In 1985, when the HIV blood test was first available, Edmund White insisted that he and his boyfriend take it. His lover was somewhat reluctant, but White insisted. "I'll be positive, you'll be negative, and then you'll leave me," White recalls telling him. "And I was right." And so America's most influential gay writer, a man whom Le Monde once called the most accomplished American novelist since Henry James, began to live with AIDS.
Since the publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973, White's Proustian prose style caught, if not the public eye at first, the eyes of the masters: Vladimir Nabokov (White's literary hero) praised his first novel, and Gore Vidal hailed his second, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). A book of nonfiction titled States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980) enjoyed encomiums from Christopher Isherwood. In reviewing A Boy's Own Story (1982), the New York Times said, "Edmund White has crossed . . . J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel."
A Boy's Own Story, a longtime big seller in both the U.S. and England, was the first of a projected tetralogy on gay life in modern America. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse '70s and the plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare as any writer in history, he writes with a passion that is meant to save his soul and those of his readers.
White, 6 ft. tall, stocky but with an athletic build, deals with "the constant low-level anxiety" of being HIV-positive by keeping busy with his work. He prefers to be called a gay writer. "Capote was a writer who happened to be gay; I am a gay writer," he insists. In fact, he has based his career on it, a high-stakes gamble that has worked. All gay writing can be labeled pre-AIDS or post-AIDS, and White's is an exemplar of the latter. His most recent short stories, three of which are collected in a book called The Darker Proof, deal specifically with the AIDS crisis.
On a snowy Tuesday in March, White meets a visitor at the Providence railroad station. "Both Diane Von Furstenberg's daughter Tatiana and Jane Fonda's daughter Vanessa Vadim are in my writing class, and Ann Charters -- do you know who she is? -- she wrote a biography on Kerouac -- is in my Genet class," White says breathlessly. On the way home, he stops off at a student's house to pick up a copy of Genet's The Screens. "Isn't he cute," White says of the student when he returns to the car. "I have to avert my eyes when I talk to him or I lose my concentration. 'I'm straight; I hope you don't find that repellent,' he said to me the other day. Wasn't that cute? 'You're doing fine,' I told him. 'Stay just the way you are.' "