Edmund White, Gay Literary Icon, has died at the age of 85

Edmund White, the gay literary icon who witnessed the Stonewall uprising and influenced a generation of LGBT+ writers, died on Tuesday, 3 June.

He was experiencing symptoms of a stomach illness at the home he shared in New York City with his husband of almost 30 years, the writer Michael Carroll, and died while waiting for an ambulance. He was 85.

Over the course of his career, White published more than 30 works, including novels, memoirs, plays, and biographies. He received the PEN / Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other accolades. He was perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story, which became a coming-of-age text for gay men of his generation.

White’s first hand account of the Stonewall uprising

Born in Cincinnati in 1940, White arrived in New York City in the early 1960s, where he quickly found himself at the centre of several significant LGBT+ political and cultural movements.

On the warm evening of 28 June 1969, Edmund White, then in his late 20s, and his friend and former lover Charles Burch were out “taking the air” in New York City’s Greenwich Village. They found themselves walking along Christopher Street toward Seventh Avenue and, as White tells it, stumbled upon one of the events that sparked the modern fight for equality.

But on that particular June night in 1969, as White and Burch approached Christopher Park — a slim triangle of green space between Christopher and Grove Streets – White noticed police vehicles parked outside The Stonewall Inn. 

“There were all these bright lights and policemen dragging out angry black drag queens,” White recalled of the events more than a half-century ago. 

As White and Burch looked on, the crowd began catcalling the police officers. Someone shouted, “Gay power.” People started throwing pennies and beer bottles at the officers.

“I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. Our group drew a still larger crowd. Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid.”

He recalls a chorus line of queens and gay boys confronting the police in their riot gear. White’s recollections of the uprising are tinged with wry humour. But that’s not to say that the event didn’t have serious, momentous consequences. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group – with rights, a culture, an agenda.”

BBC Sounds – Pride Collection

BBC Sounds have made lots of Queer radio programmes available to celebrate Pride Month. Worth turning on and tuning in!

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Out In The City is 20!
It’s our 20^th Anniversary Year
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P A R T Y !
Thursday, 19 June from 2.00pm to 4.00pm – 20^th Anniversary Party
Cross Street Chapel, 29 Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL

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