EDMUND WHITE AND I met at a gay party in Greenwich Village in 1966. Ed had brought his friend Marilyn Schaefer, and I was with my soon-to-be-wife Ann Jones, both of us doing graduate work at Columbia. We exchanged contact info, and within a week Ed and I met again—just me, not Ann. There was a not-too-serious effort at bedding down together, and once that was out of the way, we settled into a nonsexual friendship that lasted (with interruptions) for nearly sixty years.