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- [00:00]
Capella University Representative
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David Bianculli
This is FRESH air. I'm David Biancooli. Edmund White, one of the most eloquent and perceptive chroniclers of gay life and culture, died earlier this month on June 3rd. He was 85. As a boy in the 1950s in the Midwest, he tried to cure his homosexuality. He drew upon that time of life for his 1982 book A Boy's Own Story. It became an international bestseller and the first of a trilogy of semi autobiographical novels. When the book was republished nine years ago, Alan Hollinghurst in the Guardian described the book as, quote, both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness. White wrote more than 30 books, including nonfiction collections of essays, a National Book Award winning biography of French author John Genet and the guide the Joy of Gay Sex, which he co authored. We're going to listen back to portions of four of his interviews. Please be advised there is some talk of sexual but nothing explicit. We'll begin with Terry's 1985 interview with Edmund White.
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Terry Gross
When you were first starting to write and first trying to get published, do you think that being gay was an obstacle at all?
- [01:36]
Edmund White
Oh, very much so. I have always written about gay themes from the time I wrote my first novel when I was 14 years old. And by the time I got into my 20s, I was writing novels with gay themes that were always rejected, partly maybe because they weren't any good, although years later, later, after gay liberation, I would meet gay editors who had been in the closet and working for major publishers who told me that they had read my book and liked it, but they'd been afraid to recommend it because they were afraid that people would think they were gay if they came out in favor of my book. So it wasn't until after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, the beginning of gay liberation. Well, after that that I began to get published. And even so, the first book that was published, forgetting Elena, is only gay by virtue of participating in this mysterious thing called the gay sensibility. There are no explicit gay scenes in it.
- [02:35]
Terry Gross
After your first or second novel, you co wrote the book the Joy of Gay Sex. And I wonder what effect that had on your literary career. One, because it was a self help oriented book about sexuality, two, because it was Definitely a gay book. And you were a novelist, best known as a novelist until then.
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Edmund White
I think that it had.
- [02:58]
It didn't pigeonhole me as a sort of self help writer amongst gay people. Because what the interesting thing is if you compare the joy of sex with the joy of gay sex, you see that whereas almost all of the joy of sex for heterosexuals is about sexual positions, the joy of gay sex. About 40% of the book is devoted to lifestyle questions like coming out with your parents, sex in religion, how to write a will with your beloved that you live with, who has no legal status in your life, and so on. So I think gay people understood that this was a sort of handbook about being gay and that it dealt with coming out issues as much as it dealt with sexual positions. In fact, I think that Masters and Johnson demonstrated a long time ago that lesbians and gay men have a great deal fewer questions about their partners than heterosexual partners do. Because after all, one's dealing with a member of the same sex. So you understand to some degree the anatomy and the physiology of the body that you're in bed with. There are fewer mysteries. You're not dealing with the opposite, you're dealing with the same. So I think that what people were looking for in that book was reassurance and guidance in terms of lifestyle rather than sexuality.
- [04:24]
Terry Gross
Was that book a dramatic coming out of sorts for you? Because there was no way to, you know, keep that you were gay in the closet at all even, you know, even if you wanted to for one manuscript that you were submitting.
- [04:35]
Edmund White
It was definitely a big coming out for me, but it was very, very liberating to me personally. I think that my life took a turn toward being much happier after I wrote that book because I think for the first time I really was out. I thought that I had come out years before by telling a few friends, but having come out professionally that way, I think was very liberating. I then went on to write States of Desire, which is my travel book about the United States. And I think there's a kind of exuberance about that book, a kind of confidence which I had never really had in my writing before. And I think it's a real result of, of this new sense of security that I had a new sense of having consolidated my own identity.
- [05:23]
Terry Gross
How much of a period did you go through of feeling very insecure about being gay? Did you ever go so far as to try to convert, so to speak?
- [05:32]
Edmund White
Oh, absolutely. I was endlessly going out with women throughout my 20s and I was in psychoanalysis for 12 years. And I was, I think, an unusually slow learner. I mean, I was an unusually conservative and backward person.
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David Bianculli
Terry Gross speaking with Edmund White in 1985. Next, let's listen to a portion of Terry's 1994 interview with him. It began with him reading from a story called Watermarked about first love. It was from his collection of short stories called Skinned Alive. There is some talk of sex, but nothing explicit.
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Edmund White
Our love worked well because Randall was the one man in a thousand who welcomed devotion and who, like a medieval princess, believed in it only. Only after it had been proved by many deeds and long trials. Most men like chasing after, rather than being the quarry and flee, someone too obviously in love. Being adored suffocates and gives them too little imaginative scope. Only someone unobtainable leaves enough room for dreams, inspires longing, promotes scheming and implies a rival, whereas a quick and total conquest is the last act that abrogates all need for the preceding drama. But Randall had had enough strife at home and wanted to be cherished. I so enjoyed serving him and supporting him and listening to him that I forgot my own existence, certainly my own uninteresting face. If I would glance at my own reflection after a long evening spent with him, I'd be offended by the reminder that such sustained communion hadn't improved my looks. I learned what a burden beauty can be. Drunk men at parties would take an instant dislike to Randall. Eventually, I figured out their reasoning. I want him. He thinks he's too good for me, the bastard. He didn't want to be liked merely for his looks, but he needed to maintain them, just in case.
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Terry Gross
You know, I was thinking, reading this story about a first love, about whether, you know, when you were talking about looks and whether men like to be the pursuer or the pursued, I was thinking if those kinds of things are much different when the relationship is gay than it is from when it's straight. You know, I was identifying with you. You know what I mean?
- [08:05]
Edmund White
Well, I think that. I mean, some people say that the burden of being a gay man is that you're supposed to be as successful as a man and as beautiful as a woman. I mean, in other words, you have to play both roles, or ideally, you're expected to. And I think a lot of gay men feel under tremendous pressure to be both successful and attractive. And it's awfully hard to be either one. But certainly to be both is rare.
- [08:31]
Terry Gross
You know, in the beginning of this story, you write about learning to be gay, learning certain behaviors Learning to dish.
- [08:38]
Edmund White
Right.
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Terry Gross
And then teaching it to others. Were there aspects of gay culture that you felt you actually learned?
- [08:44]
Edmund White
Oh, for sure. I mean, I think that, you know, there's a difference between being homosexual and being gay. I mean, I think homosexual is simply a question of desire for a certain kind of sexual encounter with members of your own sex. But being gay implies a whole culture, a whole way of acting, of thinking. And it changes, of course, from decade to decade. In. In the case of this story, I talk about someone who's coming out in the late 1950s and who's learning from Chicago street queens how to camp and how to dish and how to. I mean, it's the sort of thing that I guess we know about now from drag queens, but that then in those days was more generally acceptable in gay society.
- [09:30]
Terry Gross
As you've gotten older, how has your idea of the ideal companion changed?
- [09:36]
Edmund White
Well, I think that I now prize real intimacy more than I did before. Perhaps I didn't even know what it was. I mean, I lost my lover to AIDS this last March, and his name was Hubert. He was French. I was with him for five years. And I think that in my own case, I was always afraid of intimacy with people. But when you live with someone, I mean, the last four of the five years that we were together, we knew that he had AIDS and didn't have long to live. And when you're living with somebody that you know is not going to live very long, you give up all your fears about guarding your independence and you just give yourself completely to somebody. Just as I feel that he gave himself to me. I mean, he had been married when I met him, and he gave up his wife, his language, his country, his job to come with me when I was coming to Providence to teach at Brown University in 1990. And so I felt like he had made a total gift of himself to me, and that's what I wanted to be able to give to him. But I think before that, I had never really understood that kind of gift. I mean, I hear people today talk about co dependency as though it's a bad thing, but I think, in fact, that's what love is. Love is codependency. It's perfectly okay to be codependent.
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Terry Gross
In your new collection of essays, the Burning Library, you write about the first time you saw one of the backroom bars of Greenwich Village in 1970. And this was shortly after you got back to the Village after living in Rome for close to a year. What was your reaction when you first saw that?
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Edmund White
I thought it was a little bit scary, but also terrific. I mean, it seemed to me that, I mean, now that because of aids, we all tend to act as though there was something abnorma. Distressing and inevitably sinful about that period of promiscuity. And even the word promiscuity, of course, is one that is loaded against the people who practice it. But I think it was Susan Sontag once who said that there was only a very brief period for both men and women, both gays and straights, when they weren't. When they were able to be sexually free. And basically it's something that started with the sexual freedom, started with the invention of antibiotics and later the birth control pill, and ended with aids. So in other words, let's say there's a period of 15 or 20 years when, in all of human history, when people had all the necessary conditions, which include the anonymity of living in a big city, the breakdown of traditional religion, the freedom from veneer disease, the freedom from becoming pregnant through sex, when people could actually practice sex as a form of self expression, as a form of art, as a form of pleasure, rather than as a form of economic exchange, or all the other things that sex has been harnessed into serving.
- [12:51]
Terry Gross
I want to read an excerpt from an essay you wrote in 1983 that was originally published in Vanity Fair called Sexual Culture. And you were writing, no homosexual can take his homosexuality for granted. He must sound it, palpate it. For that reason, all homosexuals are, quote, gay philosophers and that they must invent themselves. And then he wrote, on the other hand, no straight man stands in rapt contemplation of his straightness unless he's an ass. And so I guess, you know, like so much of your life has been given over to writing about being gay, both in your essays, in your autobiographies, in your fiction.
- [13:35]
Edmund White
You know, I have the strange feeling that writing itself is somehow linked to homosexuality. And I haven't worked this out, so I won't be able to make any sense of it. But I think it's really very odd, if you think of it, that Time magazine tells us this week that only one and a half percent of people are gay. So if that's true, think how very, very few homosexuals there actually are. And yet, if you look at the famous writers of this century, I mean, a huge high proportion of them are gay. And it seems to me that there is something about writing itself which is a way of at once participating in society, but also looking at it from an enormous distance of at once Imitating the conventions of society while having a very jaundiced eye toward them. It seems to me that that spirit which animates the work of homosexual writers like Proust for instance, or Gide or Jean Genet, it seems to me that there is something fundamental. I mean, in other words, something about being gay means that you pass or can pass as an ordinary member of society, and yet you always feel different. You always feel that you're of this other race. So it's a bit, I suppose, like a black person who looks white or a Jew who doesn't look Jewish, who is passing as a gentile or as a white person, or in the case of a homosexual, as a heterosexual. In other words, you're a kind of double agent and you're living a different kind of life from the one you feel inside.
- [15:17]
Terry Gross
So you think part of the reason why you became a writer was the sense of being the double agent?
- [15:21]
Edmund White
Definitely. I think when I first began writing it was like a kind of desperate attempt to fight off the waves of self hatred and guilt that I think were really threatening my sanity. I mean, when I was 14 or 15 years old, a psychiatrist told my mother that I should be put in a mental hospital and they should just throw the key away, that I was unsalvageable. And I certainly was, I think, right on the edge of mental collapse. And the one thing that saved me was writing. And I went to a boarding school and I would do all my homework in the afternoon so that at night during study hall, all I would have to do for those two hours was work on my novel. So I had already finished a novel by the time I was 15, another one by the time I was 17. And I didn't write in a kind of arty way. I was writing out of a real desperate need to make sense of the world, to fight off this madness.
- [16:21]
Terry Gross
Let me just backtrack for a second here. I think I know what you mean. But why would a straight person who stands in rapt contemplation of his heterosexuality be an ass?
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Edmund White
Well, it'd be like a white person sort of looking at his own body and saying, oh, aren't I beautiful? I'm all white. I mean, you would just say, what a nitwit, you know, Whereas a black person who says black is beautiful, you can understand that because since the dominant society did at least until 20 or 30 years ago, find the state of being black inferior, and little black girls back in those days used to buy white dolls to say black is beautiful was A revolutionary statement. To say white is beautiful is idiotic.
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Terry Gross
So it's about contemplating your difference.
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Edmund White
Yeah. I mean, in other words, I think if you're coming from a persecuted minority, you need to redefine yourself not in the terms of the dominant society, but in your own terms, in new terms that will empower you or enfranchise you. Whereas if you are already a member of the dominant society, to simply glory in being dominant is fatuous.
- [17:35]
Terry Gross
In one of your essays, you write that although at some point you started writing for what you perceived as a sophisticated gay reader, earlier on, as a writer, you saw your audience as an older European heterosexual woman.
- [17:49]
Edmund White
Yes.
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Terry Gross
Who was this idealized reader and why?
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Edmund White
I think it was Mrs. Nabokov. And she actually would read my writing. And when I finally met her, I finally met her years later, after her husband had died. I went to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland and met her. And she was already quite deaf. And she did that thing that deaf people oftentimes do of just doing all the talking, because that way they don't have to hear what you have to say. But I didn't mind, because she also did the thing that every writer dreams of another person doing. She recited pages of my first novel, Forgetting Elena, by heart, because she. In fact, she had a photographic memory, and she could just summon up whole pages of one's prose and recite them. And to have the woman to whom Nabokov dedicated every one of his novels and the muse of the greatest writer of the century recite to you whole pages of your own work was, of course, the most delicious thrill imaginable. But long before that, before I ever knew her. But when I knew that, in fact she was reading my writing because she would write me notes about it, I did have her as a kind of ideal reader, and not just because I admired her husband and her and them as a couple, but also because it seemed to me like a filter to make sure that. I mean, one of the things that I sometimes don't like about contemporary gay writing is that I feel that it makes a lot of inside references that make it accessible only to other gay people. And one of the things I wanted to try to do was to write about gay experience from the inside and in a fairly sophisticated way, without any hint of apology, and yet in a way that would be totally accessible to people who weren't gay. And. I don't know. I mean, once a heterosexual man in England said to me that he never had thought he'd had a single homosexual thought in his whole life, but that he had found himself getting very excited once reading one of my sex scenes between two men. And that thrilled me, not because I had managed to excite this particular man, but who wasn't one of my dream people, but but just the idea that I had been able to communicate what that kind of desire would be like to somebody who wasn't cut out for it at all.
- [20:15]
Terry Gross
Well, I want to thank you a lot for talking with us.
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Edmund White
Thank you. I enjoyed it as I always do.
- [20:21]
David Bianculli
Writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1994. He died June 3rd at the age of 85. We'll hear more of his interviews after a break. And jazz critic Martin Johnson will review the new album by guitarist Mary Halvorson's sextet. I'm David Biancooli and this is FRESH air.
- [20:39]
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David Bianculli
Pioneering gay writer Edmund white. He died June 3 at the age of 85. He wrote more than 30 books, including the semi autobiographical trilogy that began with his book A Boy's Own Story, which became an international bestseller in 1982. He also wrote an award winning biography of French writer John Genet and co authored the guide the Joy of Gay Sex. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund white again in 1997, he had written the third book in his trilogy, the Farewell Symphony. The book is narrated by a writer who has outlived most of his gay friends. He's looking back on the 1970s, the post Stonewall pre AIDS era. Terry asked Edmund White about how death affected the way he looked back at that era. Please note later there is a discussion of sex, but nothing explicit.
- [23:04]
Edmund White
One of the things I wanted to show was the 70s as it felt when we were living through it. Not from a moralistic 80s or 90s point of view, in other words. It seems to me that a lot of people are quite have been critical of the 70s and of the era of promiscuity. And they act as though it was almost a natural result that so much sexual activity would have necessarily have led to doom. But I don't believe that at all. And I tried to show that the 70s was in its own way a very idealistic period. Not just a hedonistic one, but one in which people really, especially gays, but also I think many feminists were trying to get beyond traditional coupling and marriage and were trying to have more extended patterns of relationship with other people. And that's something I find attractive and interesting. And I can imagine that if the.
- [24:07]
AIDS virus was ever licked that the gay community might easily go back to that.
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Terry Gross
You write in the new book that with the Stonewall uprising changed was not love so much as self esteem on which mutual love depends. And I'm wondering how you think that sense of adventurous sex with many partners fits into the idea of self esteem.
- [24:31]
Edmund White
Well, I mean, I think it's a double edged sword. I mean, I think that oftentimes, I think at another point in the book I say a life entirely devoted to pleasure can be melancholy. And I think that's true too that, that if you're really a short range hedonist in the sense that you're out looking for another sexual adventure every night, that eventually you feel sort of lonely and perhaps unfulfilled. But on the other hand, I also try to show that a lot of the so called anonymous sex is something that people haven't really very well understood who are looking at it from the outside, that some of the most intense and even romantic nights that I ever passed were passed with people whose name I might not have. And I think I mentioned in the book something that is in fact a true thing, that I got a couple of CDs recently from a black singer who's since then become very famous. And he said, I just wanted to send you these records in memory of a perfect night that we spent together 25 years ago. And it's true we only spent one night together. Neither of us ever forgot it. He sent me the records, and I was very touched. And I think that people have a hard time sometimes imagining that those encounters can be very intense and very, very real.
- [25:50]
Terry Gross
There's a passage I'd like you to read from the Farewell Symphony that is about the period and about that sense of sexual mania of the period.
- [25:59]
Edmund White
Sure, we equated sexual freedom with freedom itself. Hadn't the Stonewall Uprising itself been the defense of a cruising place? The newer generation might speak of gay culture, but Those of us 30 or older knew the only right we wanted to protect was the right to have as many sexual encounters as promiscuity, a word we objected to since it suggested libertinage and that we wanted to replace with the neutral word. Adventuring was something outsiders might imagine would wear thin soon enough. We didn't agree. The fire was in our blood. The more we scratched, the more we itched. Except we would never have considered our desire a form of moral eczema. For us, there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a back room and plundering body after body. There had been no radical break with the past. We'd all heard about the orgies in the Navy during World War II. But at least since I'd first come on the scene in the 1950s, three things had changed in New York City. The cops weren't closing down our bars anymore or harassing us if we held hands on the street. We now had a slogan that said gay is good and we'd stop seeing shrinks in order to go straight. And there were more and more, millions more gay men with leather jackets and gym built bodies and low voices and good jobs. We used to think we were rare birds. Now the statistics said that one out of every four men in Manhattan was homosexual. When we marched up Fifth Avenue every June, there were hundreds of thousands of gay men and women, many of them freaks, but the bulk of them the regular kind of people we liked. These were the kinds of guys I had sex with several times every week. If I had sex, say, with an average of three different partners a week from 1962 to 1982, in New York then, that means I fooled around with 3,120 men during my 20 years there. The funny thing is that I always felt deprived, as though all the other fellows must be having more sex than I. A gay shrink once told me that that was the single most common complaint he Heard from his patients, even from the real satyrs, they weren't getting as much sex as the next guy. I was so incapable of fitting my behavior into any general pattern that I would exclaim aghast, you know, Liz has been married five times. If my marriages had been legal, they would have been legion. Nor did all this sex preclude intimacy for those who never lived through that period. And most of those who did are dead. The phrase anonymous sex might suggest unfeeling sex devoid of emotion. And yet, as I can attest, to hole up in a room at the baths with a body after having opened it up and wrung it dry, to lie head propped on a guy's stomach just where the tan line bisects it, smoke a cigarette and talk to him late into the night and early into the morning about your childhood, his unhappiness in love, your money worries, his plans for the future. Well, nothing is more personal, more emotional. Of course, the sermons I preached against love and jealousy were all the more absurd because I was so besotted by Kevin. I wanted to be his wife in the most straight laced of marriages.
- [29:21]
Terry Gross
I think that last line gets to exactly the kind of contradiction that I think runs through the book. You know, because every so many of the impulses in this book seem to have contradictory impulses sitting right next to them. And this passage you read is really in praise of multiple partners, but then the character is also really yearning for that one person.
- [29:41]
Edmund White
Yeah, I've always felt that in myself that when people, whenever I've had to write something about monogamy or marriage, I've always railed against it. It sort of wells up within me. And yet it seems to me I've spent most of my life living with a single lover. So it is very contradictory. And I think most of my affairs, at least since the 1980s, have been extremely happy.
- [30:07]
Terry Gross
So how do you explain that contradiction?
- [30:10]
Edmund White
I think that there's something in me that doesn't want gay life to be simply an imitation of straight life. I think that I probably originally chose gay life. Well, that's absurd, because I don't think anybody chooses gay life. But let's say from the very beginning, gay life was twinned in my own mind with freedom. Freedom from my parents, freedom from middle class conventions, from the Midwest of my childhood. I remember when my father used to come visit me in college. The minute he would leave, I would run out and try to pick up somebody. I mean, it was like I had to have an antidote to this heavy, dull, bourgeois world.
- [30:53]
David Bianculli
That he represented writer Edmund White speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. We'll hear another of their interviews after a break. This is FRESH air Support for this.
- [31:04]
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Edmund White
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Edmund White
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- [32:06]
Edmund White
You'Re listening to the NPR Network.
- [32:08]
Terry Gross
Live from NPR News, I'm Lauren Schmidt.
- [32:10]
Edmund White
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Edmund White
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- [32:29]
David Bianculli
With npr, we're remembering writer Edmund White, who chronicled gay life and culture. He died June 3. He wrote over 30 books, including a semi autobiographical trilogy that began with his boyhood in the Midwest. When Terry Gross spoke with Edmund white again in 2006, he had written the autobiography My Lives. They started with a short reading from the chapter My Shrinks. White's mother was a child psychologist, and when he was a child, she sent him to psychologists. He wrote that when he was 15, he stopped thinking of homosexuality as being interestingly artistic and saw it as a problem to be overcome.
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Edmund White
Already I hoped to be a writer, but as I was beginning to realize, successful writing entailed a grasp of universal values and eternal truths, which were necessarily heterosexual. Foolishly, I had imagined I could transform the dross of homosexuality into the gold of art. But now I saw I could never be a great artist if I remained ignorant of the classical verities of marriage and child rearing adultery and divorce. But if psychoanalysis could convert me into a heterosexual, might it not at the same time ablate the very neurosis that made me want to write? Should I tamper with my neurosis?
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Terry Gross
That's Ed White reading from the first chapter of his new autobiography, My Lives. Ed, welcome back to FRESH air. The first psychologist who you knew was your own mother, who she became a child psychologist when you were young and she practiced on you, the way you describe it, she practiced administering Rorschach tests on you and psychoanalyzing you. Was there anything inappropriate to you about that, looking back?
- [34:19]
Edmund White
Looking back, yes.
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At the time, of course, you don't really judge your parents that much. But now looking back, yes, of course, I realize it was very crazy and that it wasn't. I mean, if your mother says to you you have severe psychological problems and you're seven or eight years old, that's not an objective piece of information for you, the child. It becomes something that shapes you and damages you and makes you lose your confidence in yourself and feel that you're very weird. And that certainly is the way I felt.
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Terry Gross
Are you describing what actually happened, that she told you this and that was how you reacted?
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Edmund White
Yeah.
- [35:00]
I mean, she did really want to test me all the time. For instance, I remember she gave me a Rorschach and she was very dismayed because I didn't see any human beings in it. I only saw gravestones and diamonds and totally weird, impersonal things. And maybe quite correctly, she saw that as a sign of a kind of borderline psychosis. I mean, I certainly was a very disturbed child, partly because I felt enormously guilty about my parents divorce. And soon after they did get divorced, I locked myself in the bathroom and I wouldn't come out and I kept screaming, I did it. I did it. I did it. I mean, it's almost like a classic example of an Oedipal complex where the boy wants to get rid of the father and then when he does, he feels terribly guilty.
- [35:55]
Terry Gross
Were most of the psychologists you were sent to when you were young because you were gay, or there are other reasons why your mother sent you to psychologists or that you wanted to see psychologists.
- [36:07]
Edmund White
Oh, it was because I was gay. And it was mostly I I was the one who initiated all this. I mean, I think I had you know, Sartre talks about people who have bad faith, an act of bad faith, that is, they're not being honest with themselves. And I think I was a classic example of that kind of bad faith because on the One hand, I was lusting after boys my own age and even older men. And that's what I really wanted. And I was obsessed with that idea of having some sort of sex with older people. But on the other hand, I knew that it was a bad thing. And I also knew that it would limit me as a writer, because that was very much the idea in the air, that a writer could only be successful if he could touch on universal topics. And homosexuality was obviously too narrow a focus or too neurotic a point of view to ever make a successful writer. So for various reasons, some of them artistic already, even at that early age of 14, 15, but also just because I wanted to be a regular guy. I mean, teenagers do want to be like other teenagers. And it's really hard to. To perceive that you're different.
- [37:22]
Terry Gross
Is there anything that really surprises you about what has happened with gay culture since Stonewall? I mean, you were. You were active in the gay rights movement, you know, back then, and you've watched gay culture evolve, gay life evolve. What surprises you most?
- [37:46]
Edmund White
Well, I think in the 70s that most gay leaders who the visible, active leaders politically were leftists. And it's because I think people who were conservative and gay felt they had nothing to gain by coming out, at least in a political way. So the gay movement was quite radical and progressive. And there was a tremendous emphasis on linking the gay fight with the fight of women, of blacks and of other minority groups. I think that that isn't the case anymore, that what happened in the 80s was AIDS killed off a lot of those radical leaders and flushed out of the closet a lot of more conservative middle class people who sort of took over the movement. And I think that that's fine. But it has meant that the whole movement, as a political movement, has drifted very much to the right, as has the whole culture. And in the same way, I think that gays used to feel they had to be cultured, that the most important thing about proving that you were eligible for gay culture was to have an opinion about Maria Callas, or to have seen the latest Pasolini movie or to have read the latest Andre G. Journal. Now there's very little pressure to do that. And I think that gay culture has been dumbed down the way the rest of the culture has been dumbed down. And that gays feel that the most important thing is to go to the gym and look great or maybe have a very good job. But I'm of course exaggerating slightly because maybe the final thing to say about difference between now and the past is that is that gay culture has become extremely pluralistic, so that you have many people who are skinny and don't go to the gym and who are artistic and live in the East Village. And you have many people who live in Chelsea, where I live, who have these big showboat bodies and go to the gym and are mostly interested in that. And you have gays of absolutely every stripe and variety. And you have many, many people who don't define themselves by their sexuality anymore. I mean, it's quite common for me to meet a younger person who, after I've known him for a few weeks or months even, I'll find out sort of in passing that he is gay. But that isn't the most important thing for him about his identity, whereas I think in an earlier period of oppression it was very important to everybody's identity.
- [40:37]
Terry Gross
You were diagnosed as being HIV positive back in 1985. I'm wondering how having that kind of cloud hanging over your head of being HIV positive has affected your life. You probably thought at one point that that was an early death sentence.
- [40:54]
Edmund White
I definitely did, yeah.
- [40:56]
Terry Gross
And thank goodness it turned out not to be. But you didn't know that. So did you make changes in your life based on the fact that you thought that you might not have long to live?
- [41:11]
Edmund White
Well, I think it's made me very productive. I mean, I think that I'm very grateful for every year that has been granted me. And so many of my contemporaries died. I mean, I belong to a writers group called the Violet Quill, and there were eight of us and only three of us are still alive. And so I think, you know, I sometimes feel that I'm writing the books they might have written or I'm expressing the things that otherwise would be lost or anyway, I do feel very grateful about having been given this extra lease online.
- [41:48]
Terry Gross
Well, Ed White, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
- [41:52]
Edmund White
Thank you, Terry. I enjoyed it so much.
- [41:55]
David Bianculli
Edmund White spoke with Terry Gross in 2006. He died June 3rd at the age of 85. If you want to hear more of our interviews with him, please go to our online FRESH AIR archives. Coming up, jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews the new recording by guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson. This is FRESH air.
- [42:16]
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- [43:19]
David Bianculli
Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson arrived on the jazz scene in the mid-2000s with a unique sound on her instrument. It was more slithery than stinging and was abetted by electronic loops. Her style was unmistakable and her virtuosity commanded attention. In the past 10 years or so, she's also been building a formidable reputation as a composer. Her current sextet, which she calls Amaryllis, the name of their first recording three years ago, features a stellar cast of musicians. Jazz critic Martin Johnson says that on their latest album about ghosts, you can hear some of the defining trends of jazz in the 2000s.
- [44:27]
Martin Johnson
In the past few years, guitarist Mary Halvorson has split her time between intimate settings such as her duet with the extraordinary pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and the collective trio Thumbscrew, and mid sized groups like her band Code Girl and her Amarilla Sextet. The larger ensembles often sound orchestral due to Halberson's arrangements. That song we just heard, carved from may remind you of classic mid-60s horn voicings. This one, Polyhedral, recalls Henry Threadgill's Shifting Groo. Halvorson formed Amaryllis shortly after winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. For a one off engagement in Brooklyn, where she left lives, she assembled a band filled with players she admired vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Nick Dutton, drummer Toma Fujiwara, trombonist Jacob Garczyk and trumpeter Adam o' Farrell. But the pandemic forced the cancellation of that performance. In the quiet months that followed, she kept writing for the band, and it was signed to Nonsuch Records. Tours followed, and instead of a one off, this ensemble of all star contributors became a stellar working unit with deep rapport and intuitive interplay. They improvised much of this intro to full neon. After playing it on the road.
- [46:34]
Terry Gross
For.
- [46:34]
Martin Johnson
About Ghosts, Halvorson expanded the group, inviting tenor saxophonist Brian Settles and alto saxophonist Emmanuel Wilkins to play on several tracks. The expanded group with its four horns recalls Halvorson's octet from about 10 years ago, but her right has become much more intricate. There are layers of sound, different instruments melding and disconnecting. Solos emerge less from a pass the baton sequence than a lead voice emerging from a like minded chorus such as o' Farrell here on Amerindhee. Notice the little bit of the standard My Ideal, a song once sung by Bing Crosby in Oferrell's solo. There's a bit of that kind of musicological shout outs on this recording. Halvorson's intro to her event title sounds a bit like Monk's Mood, and the title track is an homage to a piece written by contemporary guitar great Liberty Elman. There's a lot of merging of seemingly disparate influences and references going on in jazz these days. Artists are drawing their own lineages through the music's glorious history and coming up with music that's new but not rootless. To that end, Halvorson wrote the album's ending and most with jazz standards in mind. Sam.
- [48:52]
David Bianculli
Martin Johnson writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal and Downbeat. He reviewed About Ghosts, the new album from Mary Halverson and her sextet Amaryllis. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh.
- [49:07]
Capella University Representative
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- [49:51]
David Bianculli
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baltinato, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer for Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley. I'm David Biancooli.
- [50:32]
Capella University Representative
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