Edmund White died this past summer at the age of 85, having lived about four decades longer than he must once have expected to. His HIV diagnosis came in 1985, around the height of the AIDS epidemic, when he was in his mid-forties. It can’t have been a complete surprise, given that he’d spent most of the “golden age of promiscuity” that extended from the nineteen-seventies into the early eighties living it up in New York’s “gay ghetto.” There he was involved enough in the local scene to have been one of the original founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1981, before the cause of the new plague had come to light. For a time, that group officially adopted the view that the underlying virus must require multiple sexual exposures to be transmitted, White remembers in his memoir Inside a Pearl, the assumption being that “promiscuity was to blame. Cold comfort for me, since I had had literally thousands of partners.”
Whether that résumé point counted as a mark for or against him, White eventually ascended to the presidency of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. “I hadn’t liked myself in the role of leader,” he remembers, describing himself as “power mad and tyrannical.” Wanting an excuse to abdicate that position seems to have been a reason for his relocation from New York to Paris in 1983, though not the only one: “Secretly I’d wanted the party to go on and thought that moving to Europe would give me a new lease on promiscuity. Paris was meant to be an AIDS holiday. After all, I was of the Stonewall generation, equating sexual freedom with freedom itself.” Alas, that holiday soon came to an end, though the diagnosis didn’t end up putting much of a cramp in his style. White himself proved genetically disinclined to sicken, let alone die, as a result of carrying HIV, unlike so many of the friends and lovers (not a hard distinction in his milieu, it turns out) he ultimately buried.
Read the whole thing at Substack.