There’s no foreplay in Edmund White’s new memoir — it’s trousers down from page one. “I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them,” he writes. “For me it would be thousands of sex partners.” This won’t come as a shock to his fans, who will be familiar with his proclivities from a dozen-plus novels and a clutch of previous memoirs — not to mention the instructional manual The Joy of Gay Sex. In fact, although The Loves of My Life carries the racy tag A Sex Memoir, it’s only slightly hornier than his other autobiographical writings. What’s left to say for the randy god-daddy of gay American letters?
White, who turned 85 this month, has lived through (and chronicled) much of modern gay history. Born in 1940, he grew up in the mid-century Midwestern middle-class. “A practising gay since age 13”, he was an avid participant in the covert but fluid sexual economy of the 1950s, sneaking shags at boarding school and camp, with strangers in movie theatres and hustlers in hotels. In his early teens he met up “with young dads in station wagons” whose “back seats would be crowded with their children’s toys”. In 1960s New York City a therapist tried unsuccessfully to help him to go straight.
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