The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

In the preface to his raunchy, revealing, and sometimes disturbing memoir, The Loves of My Life, Edmund White declares that he is now, in his mid-eighties, “at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me, it would be thousands of sex partners.”

The prolific author (of fiction, nonfiction, biographies, essays, and one play) says that although it may seem absurd for an octogenarian to be writing about his sex life, he’s more than qualified for the assignment. He has decades of experience to draw on, beginning when he was a randy and eager 13 year old in Evanston, Illinois. Moreover, his sexual history tracks with that of gay men, or at least of many white American gay men, from the oppressive 1950s to Stonewall and gay liberation to the “wipeout” of AIDS to the present era of same-sex marriage and childrearing. All that makes him “perfectly situated to view how we got here.”

Writing about White’s reputation-making early novel, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), the British author Alan Hollinghurst observed that its images seemed to “translate libido into style.” White’s books, Hollinghurst noted, are driven by sex and truth-telling about it, but they also demonstrate his “avid, insatiable interest in other people.”

Elsewhere, White has estimated his lifetime sex partners at five thousand. Since some readers found that figure literally incredible, he now scales it down to “thousands.” Regardless of the actual tally, White, in his prime and even after, was quite an operator, scoring with men all over the United States, Britain, Europe, Puerto Rico, and, on one occasion, Turkey. “I seduced or hired men of all creeds, races, and ages,” he writes, “though irrationally I favored the young.”

But as Hollinghurst recognized about White’s sex writing, his detailed descriptions of physiques, genitals, and acts are features in fuller portraits of his lovers as individuals. If he wasn’t avidly interested in them as people but only as sex partners, they wouldn’t be interesting to readers.

And for all his promiscuity, Edmund White is a romantic. For him, “sex was always linked to love, even during so-called anonymous sex.”

Sex is also inseparable from writing. It is even “better on the page . . . less menacing, more exciting in literature rather than in the bedroom.” Explicit sex scenes—gay and straight—abound in White’s novels, but he’s always insisted these depictions are not pornographic. Porn is a “sex aid,” but “real erotic writing” is “sensual without being sentimental” and revelatory of human nature. He’s never understood why “sex should be excluded from serious fiction.” The Loves of My Life mixes the lowdown and high-flown, a libertine’s sex adventures and a litterateur’s allusions to Henry James, Proust, Rilke, Shakespeare, Iris Murdoch, Collette, Nabokov, and Turgenev.      

White’s sex life began early in his adolescence and continued into his seventies. (Old age seems to have extinguished the flames that raged throughout his youth and maturity.) The Loves of My Life opens with an account of his “First Lust,” an Evanston neighbor named Nick, for whom White developed a “maniacal attraction” when he was in fifth grade. The rest of the book eschews chronology and is organized thematically, with chapters on specific lovers (“Pedro,” “Jim,” “Rory”) or topics (“Sex and Literature,” “Sadomasochism,” “Sex With Straight Men”.)

Eros may have been the driving force in White’s life and sex, his main mode of human connection—“I always feel as if I don’t really know people unless I’ve gone to bed with them”—but his experiences often didn’t deliver the joy of gay sex, to quote the title of his 1977 how-to guide. Some lovers were tender and romantic; others ran hot and cold, turned violent, or went crazy. Though he had “an extraordinary sexual gift,” Pedro, a Spanish-Ecuadorean man with whom the 70-year-old White had a volatile relationship in Madrid, was prone to jealous rages, dish-smashing and furniture-throwing, and sullen moods—a major and often tiresome drama queen.   

Its no-holes-barred candor notwithstanding, what’s surprising about The Loves of My Life is the self-loathing that afflicted White for many years. He often wondered why men found him attractive. In the first sentence of the book’s first chapter, he says he has a small penis; later on, he downgrades it to “tiny.” He writes of his lifelong struggles with his weight. He refers to himself as “a wreck.” In the “Rory” chapter, White marvels that the titular character, a half-century younger than he, would want sex with “ancient, obese old me.”

The lover of thousands was a product of the repressive 1950s, when hardly anyone came out, and homosexuals were ostracized and persecuted by state, church, and society. White, like many of his contemporaries, internalized the hatred and stigma; even when he was a young man making out like a bandit, sex-wise, he hoped to go straight. He underwent psychoanalysis to be “cured.” A wise lesbian told him she didn’t know whether she could remain friends with someone who would subject himself to that pseudoscientific torture.

“As a pre-Stonewall gay,” White needed many years “to feel comfortable being homosexual.”

Having struggled so long for self-acceptance, White has no patience for complaints that “Pride parades are corporate-sponsored and gay marriage is heteronormative and that gay culture has become commercial.” These criticisms strike him as “arrogant and unfeeling” and insensitive to the fact that “many people still suffer from oppression.”

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House and Republican control of all three branches of government, a new wave of oppression threatens the hard-won freedom and rights of LGBT people—the “T” especially, but the other three identifiers, too. In just the first week of Trump’s second term, all LGBTQ+ content was removed from the White House website. Then, to comply with Trump’s executive order calling for "restoring biological truth to the federal government," the National Park Service deleted references to transgender people from New York's Stonewall National Monument website.

These may seem symbolic actions to some, but it’s hardly paranoid to think they portend much worse to come.

Writing about the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, White says that event “inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity, their dignity, their rights.”

This freedom, he avows, “is something we will never relinquish.”