REVIEW: The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White

Review by Brian Watson

Edmund White, the author who first taught me to come out to my parents — I took inspiration from the edition of The Joy of Gay Sex that he had contributed to — and subsequently introduced me to gay fiction when I found a copy of A Boy’s Own Story in a Tōkyō bookstore in 1988 is now 85. And although there are moments throughout The Loves of My Life where Mr. White refers to his senescing libido, I was otherwise thrilled to join him vicariously in bed as he recalled his sexcapades.

My writing mentor, Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased, once grew excited when he read an earlier draft of my memoir’s manuscript because I described finding A Boy’s Own Story in Tōkyō. He had a story to share, once that he knew I’d appreciate: he had met Edmund White. I remain ecstatic, knowing that I am still two degrees of separation from a writer I’ve admired since I was 22 and had constructed a pantheon worthy of aspiration: Felice Picano, Andrew Halloran, Ethan Mordden, and, at its pinnacle, Edmund White. I won’t list the multitude of authors who’ve I added since then, but Mr. White remains at the apex.

I wasn’t, however, expecting to laugh and learn my way through something subtitled A Sex Memoir. But this, to me, is the genius of Mr. White’s writing. To be able to turn phrases, find adjectives, and commit to the oftentimes mundanity or silliness of sex made me smile, giggle, and even guffaw in places. From the prologue, this gem: “Some gay men have hair on their backs and even their chests.” Guilty! And from the first chapter, this exquisite description: “His voice hadn’t changed from its high, silver, Magnificat quality.” I still shiver for that adjective choice.

Structurally, The Loves of My Life is memoir-in-essays, which I didn’t truly ken until roughly one-third of the way through. At that point in the book, a chapter titled Pedro, Mr. White beautifully informed me that “I can’t proceed entirely chronologically, since desire does not obey any timetable.” Relief washed through me, someone who worries constantly over chronology in my writing. And then the very next sentence took my relief even further: “When we masturbate (at least when I do — or did, I’m too old for it now), we flash from one memory to another, skipping decades, in pursuit of excitement, not narrative structure.” I am suddenly imagining a memoir akin to Mr. White’s, one whose structure follows a synaptic spank bank to revisit the many epiphanies and glories that gave calor to my diary in the years before I met my husband (which is not to say my husband and I are heatless in our love — quite the contrary).

The overall sense of The Loves of My Life, however, is less memoir (despite Mr. White’s insistence that “sex is better on the page”) and more conversation. Perhaps my existing adulation of the author preconditions me to feel this way, but reading of the various sexploits, with the vast cornucopia of metaphor dedicated to descriptions of his partners’ equipment, shall we say, allows me to imagine what it might be like to sit quietly with Mr. White, to ask him some of the questions he posed himself in poem format at the end of a chapter on sadomasochism. This answer stood out when asked how excited he might be to visit his imagined interlocutor in Berlin.

Q: Why the hesitation?

A: I’m afraid I’d fall in love with you. I’ve cried enough.

Therein might lie one significant difference between Mr. White and me (even though, as reading the book taught me, there are many differences): my frustrations and depressions, and anxieties throughout my closeted, gay, and now queer lives never brought me to a tear-filled despair—yet. I once joked that my motto was to never run for a train, a bus, or a man because there’d always be another, but the difference I speak to isn’t the lack of tears.

Mr. White met his great love — and qualifies this by saying, “I don’t mean the degree to which someone loved me. I mean how madly, desperately I was in love.” — in the 1960s, a man named Jim Ruddy. And in the years until I met my husband — my great love — I also experienced what Mr. White described thusly:

“I was always inclined toward love. If someone would respond to me, open up his body to me, smear kisses across my bruised lips, I would instantly begin to love him, to imagine our future, plan to prepare his favorite dishes, find his points of secret vanity and play up to them.”

But love wasn’t to be found in the places I searched. Neither in the cruising spaces — locales in Manhattan that might have been familiar to Mr. White — I haunted as a teen nor in the stream of curious men who, during my first four years in Japan, needed only to have their curiosity about sleeping with a Caucasian sated.

Yet I can imagine those tears if, after thirty-one years of love, sex, and life together, my husband might depart from me. And there is, therefore, some solace to be found in The Loves of My Life. Mr. White persisted. Perhaps the quip my mind should have recalled was the refrain of Ariana Grande’s Thank You, Next?

When I finished reading The Loves of My Life, I was reluctant to leave the conversation Mr. White had engaged me in. I wanted to know more, to pry, to grasp details (and phone numbers) for my voracity’s sake. But I returned to the paragraph with which Mr. White concludes his Stonewall chapter.

“…I recognize that Stonewall [the nights of rioting and activism initiated by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, Manhattan on June 29, 1969] 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 victory permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring. We could build our marriages, love our families, invest ourselves into our work, express ourselves in uncoded novels and poems and in the thousand other endeavors created by human ingenuity. This freedom is something we will never relinquish.”

I was three years old when Stonewall happened, and I have lived through every subsequent backlash and benefited from every subsequent victory. How fortunate I am to have had Edmund White teach me so much, from coming out to choosing the most elegant adjective.