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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.

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As time went on, I asked if I could take his picture to capture a few more cherished memories. He gladly agreed. But when I picked up my camera for our final meeting, a kind of melancholy came over me. I didn’t feel capable of capturing anything truly evocative. Still, I took a few photos—ones that may some day have value, but only as documents.

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IT HAS BEEN SAID that the three stages of sex are feel, squeal, and congeal. All are abundantly present in Edmund White’s new collection of mini-memoirs. The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir rises to the challenge of its subtitle by being both an enjoyable memoir and a lively book about sex, which the author discusses in a clear, open way that’s refreshing, and necessary, in a society as puritanical as our own.

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The Humble Lover is White’s thirty-first published book. With an œuvre as vast as this, it feels a little beside the point to be disappointed by this new novel.

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This novel shows that the struggle to come out, due to the strictures of the dominant society, has always been painful and hard won. We like to think that same-sex love isn’t just defensible but also beautiful, not only in its normalizing Pete Buttigieg version, imitative of heterosexual marriage, but also in its quirkiest manifestations.

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Short book reviews of Conversations with Edmund White, and Sister Love:  The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974–1989.

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