Nonfiction
01.24.25
The Loves of My Life Sasha Archibald

Honesty and horniness—the best policies:
a sex memoir by Edmund White.

The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White,
Bloomsbury, 224 pages, $27.99

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Longtime readers of Edmund White might be surprised that he’s written a sex memoir, The Loves of My Life. Not surprised by the territory, but surprised the territory hasn’t already been plumbed. There is a great deal of sex in White’s thirty-two-book oeuvre: the having, the wanting, the buying and selling, but mainly, the glorious remembering.

White’s writing life and erotic life have always been comingled projects. After his 1973 debut, Forgetting Elena, he published The Joy of Gay Sex, coauthored with his former therapist and dedicated “To all my tricks.” He never wrote another manual, but the books that followed stayed true to the sensibility, in that they treat sex in a straightforward, plainspoken kind of way. Sex is both a tool for bushwhacking your way through a thicket of reprobation and self-disgust, and the sweet reward. White becomes a committed gourmand. His partners number in the thousands, and although he doesn’t recall each (who could), the bliss is permanently etched. As the title indicates, The Loves of My Life is a memoir of love, too, with the caveat that White is the sort of person who “fell in love ten times a day.”

All begins with a confused Midwestern boy who masturbates into a mildewed washcloth as he dreams of “an English lord . . . whose heart would guide him up the branches and into my waiting arms and then spirit me away in the waiting Rolls.” As a teenager in the 1950s, White brazenly cruises downtown Cincinnati and writes his first (unpublished) novels, one about homosexuality and another about nymphomania.

As White’s career unfolds over the 1980s and ’90s—awards and honors; praise from Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, and Michel Foucault; a post at Princeton; the mantle “godfather of gay American literature”—he schedules call boys as a carrot for an afternoon’s work and joins orgies at the Christopher Street piers. Robert Mapplethorpe arranges for him to meet fellow writer Bruce Chatwin, and their craft chat starts with groping on the doormat. Sex becomes a time-consuming and sometimes expensive hobby. The “Pedro” chapter describes a two-month sexcation in Spain, which White spends playing the part of a dazed housewife, “an Iberian drudge with a pair of warm holes.” (White’s a bottom, dyed-in-the-wool, and if he didn’t pay for sex, he explains, the pickings would be slim.)

The kink comes off kindly. Imagine a droll grandfather-type, afghan blanket across his lap, embarrassing his children. A story involving a football, a surgeon, and a fisting colony is remembered with a chuckle. The time White crouched on the concrete floor of a warehouse and drank “recycled beer” “directly from the tap of my date’s microbrewery” was a “happy, infantile hour.” The reason he enjoys the “rich, steamy” odor of excrement is entirely prosaic: he met up with another boy for a childhood dalliance in a suburban car garage, and the boy spontaneously shat on the ground. (That one’s not a full-blown fetish, mind you, but more a “sort of booster shot.”) Penises are big in The Loves of My Life, but wholesomely so: as “big as a child’s arm,” “large as something that would have saved the lives of three Titanic passengers,” “family-size,” or, most memorably, “like an upside-down caduceus, where the snakes were veins, the wings were balls.” A lover’s hand has the soothing warmth of “terra-cotta still cooling from the kiln”; White sets on an erect penis as would “a nursling” at the breast. The through line is gratitude.

All of these vignettes move along like a sushi train, melodic enough but with no particular narrative structure. Sometimes White rambles, or wobbles off into poetry. Characters from previous books reappear, looking much as they did the first time around. Nonetheless, he remains an astonishingly elegant stylist, with a genius for similes. His witty details are always buffed to high polish. It’s a briny pleasure to read about outré sex in sentences as baroque as peonies, as smooth as eggnog. Gossamer prose and ramrod honesty are White’s dual credos, and each is made peculiar and fresh by the presence of the other.

Despite his accommodating attitudes, White is not a convert to body positivity. He speculates that it’s because Stonewall arrived too late; he was at the ripe age of twenty-nine. “I was never gay and proud,” he confesses, disparaging his “ghost white” skin, his muscles “turn[ed] to lard,” his “feeble filiform arms,” his “tiny penis.” Whereas his lovers are described with singular, piercing details, White compares himself to Mr. Snuffleupagus, the shuffling, dim-witted pet who spent many seasons of Sesame Street invisible. This self-deprecation oils the gears of White’s wit, but it also works as an invitation, gathering beneath its ribs everyone who feels inadequate to some concocted mirage of what sex should be. Look how pathetic I am, and yet how horny! I’ll take my pleasure, and you should too.

When White began writing about gay sex, there were few others doing the same, and most were in his own social circle. They met as the Violet Quill Club and traded praise; their project was too tender and terrifying to withstand critique. Now there are many more writers in this territory, and their ambitions for what sex can accomplish on the page are more elaborate. White himself names Garth Greenwell as heir apparent, but it’s not a perfect fit. In Greenwell’s most recent novel, Small Rain, the author-like protagonist endures a life-threatening medical emergency and from his hospital bed finds solace in a poem. In a similar situation, White would surely have fantasized about sex. As he confesses in his earlier My Lives, “I medicate myself on memories of T pissing in my mouth or my favorite Scotsman nodding toward me and saying to his lover, ‘Not yet, I want to fuck him some more.’ . . . the amiable Professor White is so calm and smiling because he’s drugged himself on memories of being sodomized at both ends.”

“Did art save my life?” White asks toward the end of The Loves of My Life, “Or sucking cock?” He means it as a serious question. Once upon a time, after gay liberation and before AIDS, there was a brief and bawdy Golden Age, when men like White touched each other so as to expunge the loneliness to which they’d long been consigned. Cock saves lives, White suggests, or maybe, candor about cock saves lives. This book has both in spades.

Sasha Archibald’s essays have appeared in the White Review, the New Yorker, the Point, the Believer, and in books published by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Walker Art Center, Whitechapel Gallery, and other institutions. She is an associate editor at Places Journal, a contributing editor at the Public Domain Review, and an editor-at-large at Cabinet.

Honesty and horniness—the best policies: a sex memoir by Edmund White.
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