White, Edmund

Edmund White,
natal chart (Placidus)
natal chart English style (Equal houses)
natal chart with Whole Sign houses

Name	White, Edmund Gender: M
Birthname	Edmund Valentine White III
born on	13 January 1940 at 17:11 (= 5:11 PM )
Place	Cincinnati, Ohio, 39n10, 84w27
Timezone	EST h5w (is standard time)
Data source	BC/BR in hand Rodden Rating AA Collector: Rodden
Astrology data	22°36' 10°57 Asc. 18°25'

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Edmund White
photo: David Shankbone, license cc-by-3.0

Biography

American writer who transcended his original acclaim as a "gay writer" by becoming a master craftsman of unconventional novels, non-fiction and semi-autobiographical writing. Called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers", White received the Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

White was born in Cincinnati to an engineer and entrepreneur father and child psychologist mother. His parents divorced when he was seven years old and he moved with his mother and sister to Evanston, Illinois. He tentatively came out as gay to himself at 12 but was babied by his mother who saw his homosexuality as a prolonged state of infancy. As a shy and chubby identity-seeking Midwestern teenager, White searched for books in the local Public Library about homosexuality to find only Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" and a biography of Nijinski. Neither book painted an attractive picture of gay life.

White dyed his hair blonde at 15 and planned to run away to New York with a male hustler until his prospective partner robbed him of his bus-fare and disappeared. He claimed to have had sex with several hundred people, mostly men, by the time he was 16. His mother put him in a Chicago boarding school. After he told her that he wanted to marry the son of her fiancé, he was started on treatment with a psychiatrist twice a week for his "sexual disorder." In 1962, he earned a B.A. at the University of Michigan, majoring in Chinese, and moved to New York City.

As a good-looking, trim and taut weightlifter, he embarked on a five-year relationship with another man. He would also play dumb on street corners to pick up married men with whom he had sex for money, and he posed for male porn magazines and erotic films - at the same time that he was holding down a well-salaried position as a journalist and editor at Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970.

After a year in Rome, White came back to NYC and worked as an editor at The Saturday Review from 1972 to 1973. He then returned to academia and took a series of posts as an instructor in creative writing at Yale, John Hopkins and Columbia. In January 1976 he took in his 16-year-old heterosexual nephew (who had been in a Chicago psycho ward) and played a substitute dad (campy-theatrical), overseeing the teenager's homework at night before heading out to the leather bars. White used part of the advance he received to co-write The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) to pay for his nephew's education at a private school.

Since attending the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City (which gave birth to the gay political movement), White chronicled the subsequent evolution of an American gay subculture. He and six other gay male writers formed the Violet Quill in NYC in the mid-1970s so they could meet to read and offer critiques of each other's work.

White's critically and commercially successful books include the novels, Forgetting Elena (1972) and Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). The travelogue, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), examines gay life before the devastation of the AIDS crisis. His mostly-autobiographical series of four novels includes A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), The Farewell Symphony (1997) and The Married Man (2000).

His Genet (1993) is a monumental biography of Jean Genet, the gay French novelist and playwright. Skinned Alive (1995) is White's anthology of short stories. Not afraid to show himself in a dark light, White wrote about betraying a gay teacher in His Own Story, while the HIV+ narrator of Symphony rapes a man without wearing a condom. His anthology, Gay Short Fiction (1991), was heavily criticized for its failure to include works by any men of color. Despite this, White's body of work generally presents a broad gallery of gay characters that rejects the medical, religious, and legal inscriptions that have cast negative shadows over male homosexuality.

White moved to Paris in 1983 and many of his closest friends since died from AIDS complications. He discovered that he himself was HIV+ in 1985, estimating that he had sex with over 3000 men between 1962 and 1982. A non-drinker, non-smoker, and non illegal drug-taker, he rejected the use of medicinal drugs such as AZT to combat the virus. His younger French lover, a married artist and architect, died from the disease in March 1994 while on holiday with White in Morocco. They had been together for five years. He was in a long-term open relationship with the American writer Michael Carroll, living with him from 1995 onward. They married in November 2013.

White was a lyrical chronicler of the generation of gay men who lived through oppression in the 1950s, freedom in the 1960s, exaltation in the 1970s, devastation in the 1980s and survival in the 1990s and beyond. He lived by his belief that the "true duty of gay writers is to remind readers of the wealth of gay accomplishments. Only in that way... will a gay heritage be passed down to a post-plague generation."

White died on 3 June 2025 at his home in Chelsea, Manhattan at the age of 85, while suffering from an apparent gastroenteritis infection He was survived by his husband, Michael Carroll, and his sister, Margaret.

Link to Wikipedia biography

Relationships

• associate relationship with Picano, Felice (born 22 February 1944)

• compare to chart of Genet, Jean (born 19 December 1910). Notes: Biographer

• compare to chart of Proust, Marcel (born 10 July 1871). Notes: Biographer

• compare to chart of Rimbaud, Arthur (born 20 October 1854). Notes: Biographer

Events

• Social : End a program of study 1962 (B.A. degree)

• Work : New Career 1962 (Eight years at Time-Life books)

• Relationship : Peak Sex 1962 (3,000 sexual partners, 20 years)

• Work : New Job 1972 (The Saturday Review)

• Work : Published/ Exhibited/ Released 1972 (Successful novel released)

• Family : Change in family responsibilities January 1976 (Nephew came to live with him)
  chart Placidus Equal_H.

• Work : Published/ Exhibited/ Released 1977 (Co-wrote book)

• Family : Change residence 1983 (To Paris)

• Health : Medical diagnosis 1985 (HIV+)

• Work : Published/ Exhibited/ Released 1993 (Biography released)

• Death of Significant person March 1994 (Lover died of AIDS)
  chart Placidus Equal_H.

• Relationship : Begin significant relationship 1995 (Steady relationship)

• Relationship : Marriage November 2013 (Michael Carroll)
  chart Placidus Equal_H.

• Death by Disease 3 June 2025 (Age 85)
  chart Placidus Equal_H.

Source Notes

B.C. in hand, obtained by LMR and Sy Scholfield.

Categories

• Diagnoses : Major Diseases : AIDS/ HIV

• Diagnoses : Body Part Problems : Treatment/Therapy (Rejected conventional medicine)

• Family : Childhood : Parents divorced

• Family : Relationship : Mate - Noted

• Family : Relationship : Mate - Same sex (Long term partners and a husband)

• Family : Parenting : Foster, Step, or Adopted Kids (Helped raise nephew)

• Lifestyle : Financial : Gain - Grant, Scholarship, etc. (Guggenheim Fellowship)

• Lifestyle : Home : Expatriate

• Passions : Sexuality : Extremes in quantity (Over 3,000 sexual relations)

• Passions : Sexuality : Gay

• Vocation : Sex Business : Porno Market (Some porn work)

• Vocation : Writers : Autobiographer

• Vocation : Writers : Biographer

• Vocation : Writers : Fiction (Gay)

• Notable : Awards : Public Service

• Notable : Awards : Vocational award (Literary)