Category: Reflections

I’ve just come off reading Edmund White’s 2005 New Yorker essay, “The Women I Dated as I Tried to go Straight.”

Whatever your sexual orientation, reading Edmund White’s essay is worth your time—the unchecked wit; the metaphoric grace; the vivid, often astonishing anecdotes; the shimmering brilliance that makes experience palpable. Like essayists Orwell, Woolf, or Sontag, he has that rare ability to make you pause, reassess, change course.

Above all, there’s his candor.

This morning I was heartened to see The New York Review of Books commemorating him by featuring six of his essays, written for them over the years.

Just a few weeks ago, June 3, 2025, White slipped into eternity. He had long faced declining health: a heart attack, a stroke, and his decades-long reckoning with HIV. He was 85.

I read somewhere that Vladimir Nobokov, that other preeminent prose prodigy, admired White’s literary acumen, so much like his own. What writer wouldn’t relish Nabokov’s compliment, bestowed upon so few.

White was the high priest of gay literature, writing prolifically on its themes and torments, addressing with fearless clarity the culture’s imposed shackles of shame.

Across five decades, he authored thirty books—novels, memoirs, plays, hundreds of essays, many of them distilling the gay journey into a language of self-acceptance and grace.

A devoted Francophile, he spent nearly twenty years in France, where he would write his erudite The Flâneur and Genet: A Biography.  

In A Boy’s Own Story, a blend of fiction and autobiography, White chronicles the interior landscape of a young gay man confronting the burden of identity.

His 2005 autobiography, My Lives, unflinchingly narrates his first 65 years.

With the essay “The Women I Dated as I Tried to Go Straight,” White reflects on his early sense of same-sex desire, repressed under the weight of cultural condemnation: “In the past, when homosexuality was still considered shameful, I was slow to confess my desires to anyone.”

To atone for those hidden desires, “the fire in the crotch,” White dated women—many drawn to his intellect, good looks, and sensitivity. Empathy pervades his essay as he recalls these women, acknowledging the structural inequities they faced, confronted with a patriarchal hegemony: “I came to think of men as monsters with absolute power, the darlings of the Western world, and of women as their unfortunate victims.…This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.”

White’s sympathy undoubtedly owes its genesis to the gay community’s own troubled quest for validation.

I found his retrospective vignettes of women moving, bringing alive each woman’s individuality in vivid, lyrical prose replete with introspective finesse:

Sally was celebrated for her big breasts and her face, which was that of the Apollo Belvedere—bow-shaped lips, a long, straight nose, a wide, domed brow, an ensemble that was classical and noble and oddly mature. She looked like a woman, a grownup woman, not a raddled adolescent. She said little, but she smiled dreamily with veiled eyes. Her smile had a way of lingering two beats too long, after the conversation had moved on to a different mood. Was she lost in her own thoughts and not paying attention? Had someone told her that she was at her best when she smiled? She never guffawed or squealed or made violent movements, though catty classmates told me that when boys weren’t around she was a real sow, rolling on the floor, drinking beer, and giggling with the other girls at obscene speculations about penises they had known or divined through Speedos.

He thinks that had he not been gay, he might have fulfilled their myriad longings: “Unhappy women! How many of them I’ve known. Sniffling or drinking with big reproachful eyes, silent or complaining, violent or depressed—a whole tribe of unhappy women have always surrounded me.”

For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.

White remembers falling in love with fellow schoolmate Marilyn Monroe, a recollection tender and adolescent, full of longing and projection:

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. My fantasies weren’t specific as to what I would actually say to her or do for her. I never got beyond her little smiles of love and recognition, which burned with a brighter and brighter glow.

My favorite daydream was that she’d come with me to my senior prom. All the other guys would be astonished: the toad, Eddie White, was really a prince. I pictured her on my arm, her sequinned gown glittering, her voluptuous body undulating as we entered the dining hall, which had been transformed by crêpe paper into a ballroom. It was like a mermaid’s visitation. The thin boys with their brush cuts and spotty faces, their dinner jackets and burgundy cummerbunds with matching bow ties, would gape at us. No way, man, the biggest dweeb of them all with . . . Marilyn!

Fortunately, not all the women in his life were unhappy. Some lived fulfilled lives outside a dependency on men, easing his guilt:

What I loved about Anne and Marilyn {another Marilyn}, even Alice, Sally, and Gretchen—was that they weren’t unhappy. Marilyn wanted nothing from me but my friendship, and she has it still.

Because she and the others I’ve written about here were the first women I knew who weren’t unhappy, who never once made me feel guilty, they showed me the way to friendship with women. 

White’s essay emerges a paean to women across the years who were there for him in the hard places, lending solace and fostering courage.

I will miss Edmund White keenly, a voice in the wilderness.

—rj