Home > Work > Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book
1 " Gore Vidal once said to me during an interview. “I think he’s out of his mind. Why limit yourself any more than literature has limited you? In a world where people don’t read, what are you going to make of a man who calls himself a gay novelist? What’s that supposed to mean, that he’s only going to write about cock? "
― Tom Cardamone , Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book
2 " Edmund White crashes through the cathedrals of art, history, politics, culture, and memory. "
3 " Many people (and not just gay men) recognized their lives when they first read A Boy’s Own Story. That was a big part of its importance. "
4 " With The Joy of Gay Sex, you could put the book into practice in the real world. Edmund himself boasted of experimenting with every position he wrote about in the guide. "
5 " Many intellectuals at the time—this is hard to imagine but true—believed real art could never explicitly deal with homosexuality. The poor gay artists had no alternative but to inflate whatever they might come up with by generalizing it. Edmund was, as they say, committing career suicide by writing about king dick. "
6 " We shiver with pleasure at stories of Pollack pissing into bourgeois fireplaces. What was rare about Edmund’s case, thrilling to me, appalling to Merrill, was that he felt compelled to piss into the intellectual fireplace. Even more important, he did so without ever rejecting conventional intellectual and artistic standards. So, not a revolution, but a coup. And, as if his art were as harmless as a dove’s, it all sounded like cooing. "
7 " White was being modest. He didn’t merely identify himself as gay by putting his real name on The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. He outed himself as a sexually active gay man.“To all my tricks, from Ed. "
8 " No matter how virally sullied we might become, we were not dirt. "
9 " When people complain about the energy and ingenuity gays devote to silly pursuits, they should be reminded that so many serious ones are closed to us. "
10 " This prowess with extended metaphor, which has made his fiction so memorable, the best of it so enduring, is on display here throughout. Sometimes you’ll see three or four of them big motherfuckers on the same page! "
11 " There is very little literature even on the fringes of our American canon describing sex in old age, and even less willing to explore the complexities of what motivates us sexually beyond the simple goal of orgasm-related satisfaction. "
12 " As we construct our AIDS history from these years will we be honest about who we were? (I’m not claiming to have the honest answers.) Will we resist easy reductions? "
13 " Our collective memories of these years, and what younger men learn from reading our stories, will shape the narrative for many years to come. "