The White party - Edmund White's "The Farewell Symphony" - Interview

SCHULMAN: The title of your novel The Farewell Symphony [Knopf, $25] and its cataloging of your life and loves imply that you may have expected to die of AIDS complications before its publication. Now that you am, hopefully, outliving your own death, how do you feel about having thrown caution to the wind?

WHITE: I started it as my last book. I've always depended on charm both in life and in work. I didn't want to be quite so seductive, and I didn't mind showing myself in an unattractive light.

Do you feel that the waning of the sense of crisis around gay men and AIDS has left a community that has miraculously "coped," or is there fury, despair, and regret waiting to be unleashed?

I think there will be people over 30 now who have survived and who will feel themselves becoming more and more marginalized by younger people who aren't as aware of the whole battle. That's going to be painful in a very different way. It's one thing to think, We all went through this together and survived it, and here's my story of what I went through. It's going to be another thing to have nobody want to read those stories.

So what's going to happen to AIDS literature? I don't know.

The Farewell Symphony was trashed by Larry Kramer In The Advocate for representing your promiscuity. Your novel Caracole was obstructed by Susan Sontag because she saw herself unflatteringly depicted. What do you feel when powerful people try to hurt you professionally?

In both cases they were friends, so I felt betrayed. I had sent Larry proofs of the book. In the manuscript I claimed that I was the one who invented the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Larry called up and said, "I think it was me, and I've told all the historians it was me. Could you please change that?" and I said, "Fine." Otherwise a he said to me was, "Ed, Ed, you didn't have all that sex." I said, "But, Larry, I did."

Then, the next thing I know, there's this explosion, choosing me as a focal point for his diatribe. "Sucking cock in bushes, is that all we are? What about Tolstoy, Flaubert?" and so on. Forgetting that Tolstoy and Flaubert had enormous scandals on their hands; Flaubert had an obscenity trial. Why didn't Larry call me and talk it over? He misrepresented my novel, and he misrepresented The Joy of Gay Sex, which came out in 1977, not on the "eve" of the health crisis. Even if it had, I'm not a crystal-ball reader, and nobody in 1980 would have known that in 1981 there was going to be the AIDS virus.

People say to me, "It's good; it's controversy. It's going to sell copies." But I don't feel that at all. I just feel angry and then kind of wounded. I respect Susan Sontag.... I still have dreams that she and I will become friends again. But Larry--I just wash my hands of it. I never want to speak to him again.

Although you've maintained a patrician image, you've always been open about your sexual histories and desires--hustlers, unsafe sex, masochism, phone sex, enemas, and endless tricking. This stands In contrast to what many white gay men have been calling for: gay marriage and monogamy. Is this the time for gay people to adapt heterosexual mores?

No. First of all, about my image: I never quite know what that comes from. My parents were both Texans; my mother never wore shoes until she was 16. I went to the University of Michigan, not Harvard. I never got a single penny from anybody. The minute I graduated college, I was completely on my own. I'm earning 100% of my living from my pen. Being seen as a patrician has to do with the way I talk or act or look or something, but it has nothing to do with the social realities, I've always struggled to make a living.

In terms of monogamy, I think that's absurd. People who are ranting in that way are going to lose all credibility with younger people. To say to some 20-year-old gay man "You should become monogamous" is crazy, since what they really want is a lot of sex. I have always seen gay life as an alternative to straight life. If gay life meant just reproducing straight life, I'd rather become a monk.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group