Edmund White Is Still Writing About Sex!

Lots and lots of sex

Over three thousand men have had the honor of sexing with Edmund White. Hell, you might be one of them! “The Loves of My Life,” a memoir of all this sex, is utterly, unsparingly brilliant. White laments the way sex has been removed from our culture, our books and films, the way the British have won in their battle to have sex classified as the unmentionable, embarrassing part of our lives. White wants no part of this prudishness.

I’ve taught writing at Columbia for almost twenty years and have seen sex slowly disappear off the page as if it were written in invisible ink. Today an Ed Whitean sentence like “His big balls were loose in the sac, stretching out yards of pink flesh, and his dick was large as something that would have saved the lives of three Titanic passengers” would meet so many arched eyebrows around the MFA table, the writer might die of heartbreak on the spot.

But this is the glory of Edmund White. He describes our schlongs and sacks minutely, and the joy of sex is always intertwined with his joy of being alive and of having escaped his deeply conflicted upbringing. As a fucked-up immigrant who did everything possible to create my own life, I can only applaud. And the humor! Did you expect to go into a sex scene and end up on the Titanic? It is this combination of joy and funny that makes White’s work so alive, so human, so essential. Somewhere in the universe, my missing foreskin rejoices.