Edmund White, who was pioneering as a leading, openly-gay writer, and who became a shining star of our literatures and heritage, passed away at 85 at his home in New York City on June 3, 2025. Though his flagging health left him increasingly housebound in the aftermath of a heart attack and strokes, he continued his blazingly prolific career as litterateur and gadfly right up to his last hours, having just published his 30th book and leaving new work destined for publication.
Although Edmund (also known as Ed) almost immediately relocated to France in the early period of AIDS, his participation as a co-founder of GMHC was crucial to our success. As legend has it, Larry Kramer brought six of us together, including Edmund, with whom he was otherwise barely speaking, to organize and promote a new organization for research, information and services for the new epidemic that CDC had designated as “the most important new public health problem in the United States.”
The epidemic didn’t yet have a name. At that time, in the absence of certainty of cause, infectious or otherwise, I and other physicians were calling it KSOI (Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections). I was determined that gay men not be stigmatized by disease nomenclature, a common practice historically, and I was against the group’s otherwise unanimous decision to call our new organization “Gay Men’s Health Crisis.” Persuaded by their embrace of this term, however, I quickly fell in line to support it. Though I’ve had no regrets since–I think the name has served everyone well.
From the get-go of those first meetings in Larry Kramer’s living room, there was controversy. In the wake of Larry’s scathingly satirical novel, Faggots (1978), which cast a harshly critical but also so funny and moving eye on gay life, Edmund became the leading spokesperson for affirmation of sexual freedom and gay liberation via several of his books. Most notable among these were The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), which he co-authored with his friend and colleague, psychologist Charles Silverstein, who had been a significant figure in the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973-74. This was followed by Ed’s comparably epochal States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980).
The stage was thereby set for a dialectic about gay and sexual life and values that would continue for the rest of our lives and beyond. At the outset of the first press reports on the epidemic (initially and mostly by me), Ed was leading a cluster of gay-affirming writers under the mantle of “The Violet Quill.” Initially, the most acclaimed of these works was Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran. Though Larry and Andrew were good friends and colleagues, Dancer was pitted against Faggots as oppositional representations of gay life.
Though he declined further participation in GMHC or its successor ACT UP, Ed was key to our early organizing. I thought of myself as a close friend of Larry Kramer, but I was also critical of him. This mirrored my roles more generally in the gay community at that time–as a physician and gay liberationist writer. I was always on all sides. Ed, it became increasingly clear, was not. Larry Kramer was a notoriously difficult and contentious figure, and there was much that needed to be said about his tactics and rhetoric. While most of us awkwardly and often unsuccessfully kept trying to straddle the divide between these polarities, I think it’s fair to observe that Ed was never able to abide by Larry, who he considered his ideological nemesis.
In my forthcoming book, Wayfaring With Ned Rorem, I explore more personally and in greater detail the fallout between Edmund and Larry. Whatever water still flows under those bridges, GMHC is deeply indebted to co-founder Edmund White, who, more than any other figure, gave GMHC and the greater AIDS activist movement the imprimatur of Gay Liberation. We couldn’t have done it without you, Ed. May you now rest in peace, as your legacy takes flight.
Larry Mass,
Hollywood, Florida, June 5, 2025
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