The China Mail - Pioneering US novelist Edmund White put gay life on the page

Homosexuality was at the heart of his writing from his earliest books when being gay was considered a mental illness, to the sexual liberation after the Stonewall riots in 1969, which he witnessed firsthand.

Then came AIDS that decimated an entire generation of gay men, and from which White was directly affected after being diagnosed HIV positive in 1985.

An influential author, prolific journalist, literary critic and teacher, he penned more than 30 books that took in fiction, biography and memoir.

- Adored by Nabokov -

He was celebrated from the get-go with his first novel, "Forgetting Elena" (1973), praised as a marvelous book by the Russian master Vladimir Nabokov.

White followed it up with the very explicit "The Joy of Gay Sex" (1977), a kind of illustrated Kama Sutra that became a gay reference across the US.

"A Boy's Own Story" (1982) began what would become an acclaimed fictional series inspired by the different stages of his own life.

He lived in Paris in the 1980s and wrote authoritative biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud, three iconic French homosexual figures.

He wrote several memoirs in the 2000s, always with his acerbic wit, including his last book published earlier this year, "The Loves of My Life".

In it he recalled all the men he had loved -- White numbered his sexual partners at some 3,000.

The New York Times described the book as "gaspingly graphic, jaunty and tender".

- New York freedom -

Born on January 13, 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, White grew up in Chicago.

His father was a womanising entrepreneur and his mother a psychologist.

When White told her aged 14 that he preferred boys she sent him to several psychiatrists to try to rid him of his "illness".

But early on he decided to embrace his sexuality, not hide or repress it.

After studying Chinese at the University of Michigan, he fled the Midwest to follow a lover to New York.

He freelanced for Newsweek and worked for several years at the publishing house Time-Life Books, before hitting success with his own books.

His literary renown opened the doors to teaching at prestigious US universities, including Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale and Princeton.

Back in New York after his time in Paris, he settled with his partner, writer Michael Carroll, who was 25 years his junior, whom he married in 2013.

He survived HIV and two strokes and a heart attack in the 2010s.

L.Johnson--ThChM