Edmund White’s Post Gay Autobiographies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores the achievement of the gay American author Edmund White’s numerous autobiographies and memoirs. After surveying the formal and thematic variety of White’s individual life writings, it then questions why nearly all of them were written after the explosion of gay life writing that took place in the United States beginning in the 1970s, that is, after the periods of greatest struggle for homosexual emancipation and the fight against AIDS. The essay argues that White’s non-fiction memoirs subtly re-configure the nature of the genre itself. Rather than explaining the narrator’s sexual difference to an audience not entirely aware of homosexuality (as did much early gay life writing) or struggling to find a voice in a homophobic society (one of the great themes of White’s autobiographical fictions), White’s non-fictional autobiographies establish a self-assured voice that presumes the world can be usefully examined and explained by the individual gay subject. They situate the gay speaker at the centre rather than on the margins of American and Western culture. Using the form to understand the world from a gay perspective, White merges sociological analysis with traditional forms of life writing to create something new in the American gay canon.