“Tall Blonde With a Big Dick”: 18 Men Ask Edmund White Some Sexy Questions

There is no man better suited to talk about the ins and out of gay sex than Edmund White. The 84-year-old literary icon has had a lifetime in the trenches, starting early—“Stung from 10 or 11 by sexual desire”—before moving through decades of hustlers, boyfriends, lovers, fuck buddies, and long-distance trysts. As a result, White is not only America’s most renegade gay novelist (his 1982 masterpiece A Boy’s Own Story redefined the coming-out and coming-to-terms narrative), but also the author of daring, invaluably explicit texts that have guided more than a few curious men toward their proper destination (including the original The Joy of Gay Sex [1977] and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America [1980]). Of course, White has always written about sex—candidly, viscerally, and sometimes comically—but this January, he’s finally made it the exclusive focus of his latest book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. The sex-positive tome contains plenty of bedroom—or backroom—fodder, taking the reader from the golden age of promiscuity through the grim era of AIDS, all the way to the silver daddies, boys-on-the-make present. To celebrate the American hero, we asked 18 gay men—writers, artists, and filmmakers—to offer a sexy question for White to answer. Don’t blush.

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BRAD GOOCH:

 

Which male hustler wins your lifetime achievement award and is nearest and dearest to your heart?

EDMUND WHITE: A guy named Aaron who was a big, tall, blonde Mormon. He unfortunately died of a meth addiction, but I had sex with him more than probably any other human being in my life. This was when I was in my sixties. I took him with me to Edinburgh for a book festival, to Greece—we went on lots of trips together. Even though we became very good friends and had sex a lot, he always charged me. Every time.

GOOCH:

 

What was sex like with [writer] Christopher Cox?

WHITE: He was my lover for a number of years. I met him at the Glory Hole, which was a bar by the old Eagle on 11th Avenue and 21st Street. You would pay your money at the front, and then there were little holes in the wall in hundreds of little rooms. People would stick their dicks in, or if they wanted to suck, they could do that. The night I met him, he was actually on speed and couldn’t get it up. So he sucked me. Then he invited me home to his loft, and when I woke up the next morning, I looked around and thought, “He has all the same books that I have.” He was basically a top, really cute and nice, from the South, so I was in love. It went on for a few years. He was a part-time hustler. One time I hustled with him and there was this pathetic, poor man who sat in a bathtub and wanted us both to stand on the bathtub rim and go poo-poo on him. So we did. I thought afterward he’d be grossed out, so I made the mistake of washing it away myself. The man said, “No, that’s my job!”

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BRONTEZ PURNELL:

 

Have you ever embarked on celibacy?

WHITE: Yes. I was in love with Keith McDermott, who lived across the street from me on Horatio Street in the 1970s. He wasn’t in love with me, but he liked me a lot, and eventually we lived together for three or four years. He said he was tired of the sex, because he was such a beauty. This was when he was starring in the play Equus and had to get naked eight times a week onstage, with all these dirty old men in the audience with binoculars looking at him. He was so good-looking that Bruce Weber shot him. Anyway, he said, “Let’s have a chastity club. We can sleep next to each other, but we can’t have sex, because I’m not going to have sex with anybody for the next two months.” I went along with it because I was so in love. If you’re in love with somebody, it’s not like you have to have sex every second. You more want to make sure he’s not having sex with anybody else, and you want to be with him all the time.

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BRUCE LABRUCE:

 

I recently read your memoir City Boy [My Life in New York in the 1960s and ’70s]. One of my favorite passages is your spirited defense of friendship over love, to wit: “I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they have already been rewarded.” This seems to me a radical posture! I’m wondering if you could elaborate on the ideas of love and friendship. Surely friendship entails a kind of love, but why is it so undervalued in our culture in comparison to romantic love? Is romantic love merely a canard propped up by poets and greeting card manufacturers?

WHITE: I think the reason that romantic love is so valued is because, for straight people, it almost always leads to marriage, which is the main institution of our civic life. I think in the past, people didn’t know what to make of friendship. I lived in France for 16 years, and it seemed to me most of the French people I knew, their only friends were their family members. The American idea of turning your friends into a family, which we all subscribe to, is still kind of unusual in the world. The French have gradations of words like copain, which is just a buddy. Connaissance is just somebody you know, and an ami is a really big deal, and you only have four or five of them in your whole life. Once somebody is a friend, it’s a friend for life, and you would do anything for them, like give them all your money if they needed it. Whereas for Americans, everybody’s your friend. They don’t make distinctions. In my case, so many of my friends I actually had sex with first, at least when I was younger and cuter. I liked people right away, say, if I’d seen them naked. I have one friend I’m still very close to all these decades later, but it started with me giving him a massage and sucking him. That really cemented our friendship.

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RYAN O’CONNELL:

 

What qualifies as good sex writing?

WHITE: I think there’s pornographic writing, which has to be formulaic and follow the rhythms of jerking off because it’s one-handed reading. Whereas good sex writing that you might put into a serious novel is about all the things that go through your head when you’re having sex, which are often comic. [French philosopher] Henri Bergson defined comedy as when the body lets down the spirit. Let’s say you can’t get it up, or you have a cramp in your leg, or you’re thinking about your sister’s cancer, or whatever, while you’re trying to have sex. All those things are real-life events at war with the single-mindedness of sex.

O’CONNELL:

 

What’s better than sex?

WHITE: Nothing.

ALEXANDER CHEE:

 

Having written the The Joy of Gay Sex early in your career, would you add anything to it now? And are you aware of having trained any of your lovers who came to you after you wrote that book?

WHITE: Well, The Joy of Gay Sex had to be revised. The second version [The New Joy of Gay Sex] was done [in 1993] by Felice Picano and Dr. Charles Silverstein, because of AIDS, to include safe sex and all that. I remember in my book States of Desire, I wrote about a Texas guy who would say, “I’m fixing to come,” when he was about to come. I thought that was so funny, I had to put it in. He was a good-looking, tall blonde with a big dick. I met him years later and he teased me about having written that about him. He met some guy I’d also written about in Los Angeles. He said they both were licking their wounds.

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GARY INDIANA*:

 

Why did you find it necessary to write, in one of your books, that I had sex with somebody in the remains of the Dachau death camp, when this event, if it can be called an event, was clearly a fictional one, in a fictional novel, occurring between characters who weren’t even based on myself? I realize that I once called you a liar, but it’s very strange that you would go to such lengths to prove it.

WHITE: I always thought Gary and I were friends, and I can’t believe that he’s been harboring this grudge for a decade. I admire him and I admire his writing. I always thought he wanted to be a transgressive writer like Dennis Cooper. So if I made that mistake, I didn’t think he would resent it. And I wish he’d told me years ago so I could have corrected it at the time. The other thing I’ll say is that I think Gary should write Barron Trump’s fictional memoirs.

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JOHN WATERS:

 

What is the polite comment for a mudslide?

WHITE: I had an Italian aristocratic lover, and after he’d fucked me, if there’d be a little shit on his dick, he would say, “Oh, we’re all human.”

 

WATERS:

 

Have you ever felched?

WHITE: No.

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RICHARD HAWKINS:

 

Did sex become kind of ick when you were writing Marcel Proust: A Life?

WHITE: I don’t share Proust’s taste for having rats battling on my face when I’m coming. That was what he liked. But it was kind of irrelevant to me, although I admire his breadth of gay references. He describes the first silver daddies with the characters Jupien and Charlus. And he describes the first boys on the financial make, like the violinist, Morel, who is just trying to get rich. And as soon as he does, he drops his lover.

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SAMUEL R. DELANY:

 

I have never lived with another person in anything other than an “open relationship.” Is there anything you can say on the different types of open relationships you can have? In my case, some have involved not bringing new partners home. In some cases, it’s been open to that sort of thing. I believe it takes just as much thought to have a successful open relationship as it does to have a monogamous one.

WHITE: I think an open relationship probably requires even more negotiating with somebody than being faithful, because the constant theme of fidelity is jealousy. Christopher Cox, for instance, was a very jealous, possessive lover. And if I would be a little late for an appointment, he’d be like, “What were you doing in those 15 minutes? Let me put my finger up your asshole and see if it’s wet.” I do think people have to negotiate. Some couples decide you can never see a trick more than once, and some people decide you have to do it in threeways with your lover. There are all kinds of rules. I think that fidelity is really tough among gay couples, although Charles Silverstein, the doctor I wrote The Joy of Gay Sex with, divided gay people into adventurers—by which we meant promiscuous people—and nest builders. But the other problem with the threeway is an etiquette problem of showing as much attention to your lover as to the newcomer. Being a man, you’re naturally more interested in the new person.

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JACK PIERSON:

 

Who is the most famous person you’ve slept with?

WHITE: The problem with that question is I can’t say. I have been to bed with a few famous people, but I dare not mention their names.

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ALAN HOLLINGHURST:

 

What was the first description of gay sexual activity you ever read, how old were you, and what impression did it leave?

WHITE: I was 12, and it was Death in Venice, which you don’t think of as very sexual, but if you’re 12 and horny like I was, you would look up the word “homosexuality” in the dictionary and get excited by that. Death in Venice was so gloomy. Nevertheless, I was so excited to find a high-style novella that was written about platonic gay love. And by platonic, I mean like Plato.

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ANDREW HOLLERAN:

 

Do you think the golden age of promiscuity was a golden age? Do you think American culture is becoming prudish again? Does man live by the carnival-atonement cycle, as the psychologist Erik Erikson said? Or is there no going back?

WHITE: I think Erik Erikson is right. I think we’re at the height of the prudish period in our culture, but we’re heading back to the carnival. And I hope the sooner, the better. I do think the golden age really was a golden age though, because between 1970 and 1980, there was no AIDS and there were antibiotics which would cure people. And if you were straight, there were pills to keep from getting pregnant. It was a free-for-all. Susan Sontag used to say it was the only decade in human history where people were really free to have the kind of sex they wanted. That said, even in the golden age of promiscuity, I used to go to a clap clinic and to a shit clinic to test for amoebas. Those were the two big gay diseases. I’d sit in the waiting room of the clap clinic, and there’d be 20 guys waiting, and a lot of them would be friends. Once my regular doctor was away and his assistant gave me my antibiotic shot. Then he said, “Why don’t you fuck me?” And I said, “Here?” And he said, “Yeah.” And so he just dropped his pants and kneeled on the doctor’s table. And I fucked him.

JUSTIN TORRES:

 

What is your favorite sex scene in literature?

WHITE: David Plante has an 80-page gay sex scene in The Catholic, which is pretty great.

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TASH AW:

 

Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with someone during a purely sexual, one-off encounter, and if so, have you ever done so?

WHITE: Jean Genet once said, “I never experienced sex in its pure state.” Meaning he was always feeling romantic about every partner. I’m a little like that, where even at the Baths, if it was good sex, I would tend to fall a little bit in love with the person. And if I’d smoked a joint, I’d really fall in love.

AW:

 

Who do you find sexier, [André] Gide or Genet?

WHITE: Genet. But I don’t find Gide sexy because I’m not a pedophile.

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JEREMY O. HARRIS:

 

Was there a moment when sex stopped feeling like the height of intimacy with a person? Was it ever?

WHITE: Sex is probably a necessary but not sufficient condition for intimacy. In terms of anything more intimate than sex, maybe cooking together?

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CONNER HABIB:

 

I was wondering about love and its strength, or maybe love and its spirit, in your imagination and writing. Where do you feel the strength of love comes from, in its ability to express itself and even flourish in brutal, desperate and rigid contexts?

WHITE: Our particular kind of courtly love is certainly from a medieval Christian tradition that’s been perpetuated all the way to this point in history—today through movies; it used to be through novels. Once you’ve read a lot of novels or seen a lot of movies, you fall in love quickly. In other words, as a great Frenchman said, no one would ever have fallen in love unless he had first read about it.

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MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM:

 

Have you ever found that attraction can grow, as opposed to fading, over time? That is, have you ever gotten to know someone so deeply that you begin to find him attractive, although you didn’t, particularly, when you first met?

WHITE: I think this question shows what a wonderful person Michael is. He probably is of a superior moral quality to fall in love with somebody gradually and find them sexy because you admire them so much. That’s never happened to me. I’m either attracted at the beginning or not at all.

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CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN:

 

Over the course of your sex memoir, we witness the art of cruising go from 1950s Kentucky hustlers in our mutual hometown of Cincinnati all the way to the online world of today. What was the best cruising spot on the planet of any decade?

WHITE: The best was the ’80s in Crete, because everybody from the mayor on down to his grandson was available if you would pay them a little bit of money. I mean, everybody was hustling in the Crete town of Chania. They would all be sitting, late at night, in a certain part of the park and you’d go there and take your pick. The other great thing about this tiny village was that they had a gay bar called the Cuckoo’s Nest. And over the door they had a sign in English that read, “No AIDS Please.” One of the reasons the island was so great was that it had a Greek naval base the next village over. In Greece, every man had to serve in the navy between 18 and 22. They were paid such little money per month, not even enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, that they were all good for play. I lived in a fabulous Venetian palace that I rented. I would always drag all these boys back and they would be so impressed by the palace. My favorite were the tall Macedonian sailors, all called Spiros. It’s not like that anymore. The bad habit of heterosexual dating has reared its ugly head.

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* RIP, 1950–2024