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Edmund Valentine White III was born 50 years ago in Cincinnati to a father who was a chemical engineer and a mother who was a psychologist for retarded children. He is the seventh Valentine in the White descent. His older sister Margaret Fleming, a psychotherapist, recalls that even as a small boy her brother was different: "Like most kids I was a conformist, but not Ed. I didn't understand him then and probably tortured him a lot . . . Today he's my hero. When my parents divorced, he was only seven, and he took it very hard. He became a very lost little boy; our father was very rejecting of him."
Before learning to live with AIDS, White had to learn to live with his homosexuality. "I didn't want to be gay," he says. "I wanted to be normal, to have a wife and kids, not have a lonely old age." So why gay? "He has always said," says Marilyn Schaefer, a lifelong friend, "that it happened because of the divorce. That he absorbed too deeply his mother's longing for a man."
For years White sought a cure through analysis. "But in my fourth and final go at therapy (this time, at last, with a gay psychoanalyst), I'd finally come to some sort of terms with my homosexuality," White writes in States of Desire. By the time he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1962, he had accepted -- indeed become fully committed to -- a homosexual life and life-style. He moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, working by day, writing by night, and coming to the realization that his art would suffer unless his culture were reflected in his writing: "You see, many of us began by thinking that we were basically heterosexual except for this funny little thing, this sexual habit we had somehow picked up carelessly -- but we weren't homosexuals as people. Even the notion of homosexual culture would have seemed comical or ridiculous to us, certainly horrifying."
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, his second novel, was written in a mood of gay fantasy. It was turned down by 12 publishers before it found its way to Michael Denneny, an editor at St. Martin's Press. Denneny was mesmerized by White's poetic prose and daring story. "Of all the gay writers who made it in the '70s, Edmund was the only one who had entree in the pre-existing literary circles, the sophisticated world of Susan Sontag and Richard Howard, but he turned his back on it. He wanted it known that he was a gay writer. That was a very brave decision on his part. For me, that made him a gay leader."
In States of Desire, his 1980 travel book, White set out "to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people." William Burroughs said, "In Edmund White we may have found our gay Tocqueville." But the book had its critics as well. In a blistering review in the New York Times, Paul Cowan wrote, "In this journey through the baths, the bars, the streets full of preening young men, the narcotized one-night stands that are the signposts of nearly every city he visits, Mr. White shares what seems to me his characters' tragic self-delusion."