The Violet Quill
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
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Literary legend Edmund White
photo: Robert Peterson, courtesy Edmund White
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I was a terrified 16-year-old when I read the first coming-out novel ever written, 1982's A Boy's Own Story by literary icon Edmund White. That book changed my life. And that's exactly what I told White when I called him at his NYC home last week.
"I'm always thrilled when someone tells me that," White replied. "When an 18-year-old black kid from Africa says, 'Your life was just like mine' - if you go far enough inside and write your deepest feelings honestly, there is the chance that your writing can cross the decades and still influence people."
White pauses. "A Boy's Own Story is quite dour, but it is the first coming-out novel. Now they're legion!"
At first I was scared of buying a gay title in a bookstore because in those days the cashiers would scowl at me when they realized I was a faggot.
Today, you'd think it'd be easier purchasing books on Amazon. But last week the online retail giant was widely criticized for yanking thousands of gay titles from its website in what Amazon now claims was a "glitch."
"I don't think it was a glitch," White says. "It's shocking that someone in that organization has the power to [get rid of] gay books. All my own books were [also] affected. I wrote in my name [on Amazon] last week and A Boy's Own Story wasn't there! Only four of my 22 books were there. It was astonishing."
Larry Kramer says we should boycott Amazon, but White tells me, "Not now. They've put them all back. But thank God for Twitter for starting the shit storm.
"Frankly,
if one of the custodians of Western culture is a corporation like Amazon, perhaps they should be regulated like the financial world. We need regulation in the cultural world too so that they don't restrict anything, like Amazon did."White, of course, famously got his start as a charter member of the NYC writers group The Violet Quill, alongside my friend Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Christopher Cox and George Whitmore. To quote Wikipedia, they are "the pathbreaking gay male literary nucleus of the 20th century."
"There are only three of us left," the 69-year-old White says of himself, Holleran and Picano. "We're all writers, so we're all pretty strange! They are great friends."
When I mention to White that I will pitch a Blue Metropolis panel with the three of them - just imagine gay lit icons White, Picano and Holleran together in one landmark panel at Blue Met next year! - a clearly delighted White tells me, "That'd be great!"
Historic is what it would be. Not to mention sold out.
"We're all attending the Lambda Literary Awards in May," adds White, who is nominated for his new critically hailed biography of bisexual French poet Arthur Rimbaud, called Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (Atlas & Co.).
"Because he was young, people thought he was instinctual, but Rimbaud was well-versed in past modes of poetry and abreast of all the latest trends," White says. "I think he was very cold, driven and destructive, the same qualities that appeal to adolescents today and to those who lead transgressive lives. Rimbaud was unbearably hostile to the people who tried to befriend him in Paris, and then he left to become a gunrunner in North Africa."
White is also known for penning biographies of Proust and Genet, as well as his recent Broadway play Terre Haute, inspired by the essays Gore Vidal wrote for Vanity Fair about his correspondence with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. Vidal freaked out and threatened to sue White for suggesting he'd been physically attracted to McVeigh.
"I had [originally] sent him the script and he approved it," White says. "In the program notes, I was careful to note that [Vidal and McVeigh] had never met. But there is one Oklahoma bomber and one famous writer. So I wrote Vidal a letter and reminded him he approved it, reminded him of the times we had met, that he had blurbed a book of mine in 1978. Then he dropped it and never sued me."
This is the kind of gravitas White brings to Princeton where he teaches creative writing workshops to undergrads. "It's a privilege at 69 to look so intensely into their lives - I feel like a voyeur sometimes - but every semester you get an outstanding writer."
And if he had to do it all over again, White insists he'd do it as an out gay man, despite the homophobia. Besides, he notes, "America is a country of great writers but few readers. There [gay] books don't sell very well [because gay men] spend all their time in gyms!"
ooo
Essential buttplugs Don't miss upcoming Blue Met events with my friend, Montreal author and newspaper columnist Bill Brownstein - Bill, you fabulous bitch! - with 20 of the real-life characters featured in his terrific book Montreal 24: Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a City, April 25 at 8 p.m., as well as panels with NYC-based classical scholar and openly gay best-selling memoirist (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million) Daniel Mendelsohn, April 25-26.
All Blue Met events are at the Hotel Delta Centre-Ville (777 University). Surf to www.bluemetropolis.org.
