Bloomsbury pays tribute to pioneer of gay literature Edmund White

Bloomsbury editor in chief Paul Baggaley has paid tribute to the late Edmund White, an American writer whose books include A Boy’s Own Story and The Joy of Gay Sex, who died on Tuesday 3rd June aged 85.

A novelist, playwright, memoir, essayist and pioneer of gay literature, White wrote more than 30 books over his career, including a number of memoirs: My Lives, City Boy, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, The Unpunished Vice and The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. His writings spanned his tastes in literature, his life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and his sex life.

Baggaley said: "It was with great sadness that I woke to the news of Edmund White’s passing. He wrote some of the best and bravest novels, biographies, and memoirs of the past 50 years, many of which will remain classics for generations to come. It is impossible to overstate the importance or influence of his writing, in bringing the gay experience to the widest readership, and always achieved with wit, elegance and sexual candour."

Since his passing, tributes have appeared in the Atlantic, describing White as "a writer who knew the joys of sex", and the Times, who call White a "groundbreaking paragon of gay literature". A number of authors including Colm Tóibín and Olivia Laing paid tribute to "the patron saint of queer literature" in the Guardian. 

Yiyun Li said that White "brought a lightness into my life", while Laing said that "he expanded the bounds of what could be written about". 

Seán Hewitt commented: "White’s books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. 

"What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference."