Edmund White
Edmund White (born. January 13, 1940) - in full, Edmund Valentine White III - is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999, he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993. He is the namesake of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, awarded annually by Publishing Triangle. As recalled in our testimonies and further elaborated by Bruce Rind in Censoring Sex Research (2013), White has been open about his own positively experienced age-gap sex during youth. Dr. Rind explained:
White discussed some of his boyhood sexual experiences in an interview with journalist David Tuller (2002). Tuller noted how White recounted "with relish how he started cruising grown men from the age of 13 or 14 at beaches and public toilets in Chicago. Tuller quoted White:
- I was very oversexed, absolutely driven wild by desire. I would pick up men, and then they would abandon me as quickly as possible because they were worried that I was jail bait. The first one was a handsome architect, who actually had children older than me. I was absolutely fascinated by him, and I seduced him. I followed him to his car, walked right up to him and started talking to him. My mother was away and I said, 'Come back to my apartment.' And it was terrific.
In his autobiography, White (2006) added details to his teenage pursuit of men. While still underage, he would save up money by working during the week and then use it to buy the sexual services of adult men on the weekends." (Rind, pp. 295-296).[1]
In an endorsement for Mitzel's 1980 book The Boston Sex Scandal, a book recalling the Boston-Boise affair which led to the founding of NAMBLA, White wrote:
- In his irreverent, hilarious and hard-hitting prose, Mitzel reveals the hypocrisy and cynicism that underlie the current crusade against intergenerational love. This book is a detailed look at the often banal, always ambiguous truth that the sex scandal headlines have masked. I predict that children’s liberation will be the next great social movement in North America. This book will serve as a major document in what will turn out to be the most violent and radical debate on human rights we shall witness.
In his 2005 memoir My Lives, White cites Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Andre Gide as influences.[2] (All 'gay' writers who have some relationship to pederasty). White's favorite living writers in the early 1970s were Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, and the author Christopher Isherwood.[3] He has stated that "Nabokov’s job in the book [Lolita] is to make you like the monstrous Humbert Humbert [...] In the 1960s readers were too swinging to see how evil he was and now readers are too prudish to see how charming he can be."[4]
White's books include The Joy of Gay Sex, written with the founder of the Journal of Homosexuality Charles Silverstein (1977), and a biography of Jean Genet (who wrote sympathetically on pederasty). Much of White's writing is on the theme of same-sex love, and often includes age-gap relationships.
References
- ↑ White (2006) refers to: White, E. (2006). My lives: An autobiography. New York: HarperCollins.
- ↑ Cartwight, Justin (September 25, 2005). "My Lives by Edmund White". The Independent. London.
- ↑ White, Edmund (2009). "'How did one edit Nabokov?'". City Boy. "Gerald Clarke... had gone to Montreux to do an interview with Nabokov for Esquire, and followed the usual drill... On his last evening in Switzerland he confronted Nabokov over drinks: 'So whom do you like?' he asked — since the great man had so far only listed his dislikes and aversions. 'Edmund White' Nabokov responded. 'He wrote Forgetting Elena. It's a marvelous book." He'd then gone on to list titles by John Updike and Delmore Schwartz (particularly the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"), as well as Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy among a few others."
- ↑ Edmund White Thinks Most People Misread ‘Lolita’ (New York Post, 2020).