American writer Edmund White was BOTD in 1940. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he grew up in Illinois with his mother after his parents’ separation. Accepted to Harvard, he instead studied at the University of Michigan, reportedly to stay close to his therapist who promised to cure him of his homosexuality. After graduating, he followed his then-boyfriend to New York City in the early 1960s, immersing himself in the city’s burgeoning gay scene and working with gay psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, who encouraged him to accept his sexuality. His first novel Forgetting Elena, a portrait of gay sex on a fictionalised Fire Island, was followed by 1977’s The Joy of Gay Sex, co-written with Silverstein, bringing him an international readership. (He later joked, “I think if I wrote it alone it would have been called “The Tragedy of Gay Sex”). Along with fellow Violet Quill writing club members Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano, he became a prominent figure in the emerging sub-genre of gay literary fiction. He is best known for his 1983 autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story, detailing his conservative upbringing in Eisenhower-era America. Hailed as one of the definitive gay texts of post-war America, it made him a literary celebrity and a highly articulate spokesman for gay male culture. He moved to Paris in 1983, where he finished The Beautiful Room is Empty, the second in his biographical series. Diagnosed with HIV in 1985, he published the final part of his trilogy, The Farewell Symphony in 1997, chronicling the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on New York’s gay community, in which the unnamed narrator envisages his own death. Given a new lease of life by anti-retroviral medication, he returned to New York in 1990 to teach creative writing at Princeton University. His prolific output included much-admired biographies of gay writers Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; Skinned Alive, a collection of short stories; The Married Man, a novel based on his relationship with a Frenchman who died of an HIV-related illness; My Lives, an episodic memoir recounting his experiences with hustlers and an unhappy sado-masochistic affair; City Boy, a gossipy account of his life in 1970s New York; and The Unpunished Vice, a personal history of his love of reading. His 2006 play Terre Haute, a play based on Gore Vidal‘s correspondence with Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, inferred a romantic attraction between them; a predictably enraged Vidal called White “King Fag” and subsequently threatened to sue him for libel. White’s last published work, The Loves of My Life, surveyed his prolific sex life. White was in a non-monogamous relationship with Michael Carroll for over 30 years, marrying in 2013 and remaining together until his death in 2025, aged 85. His elegant prose style and sex-positive confessionals have influenced generations of gay writers, including Alan Hollinghurst, Garth Greenwell, Garrard Conley, Andrew Sean Greer, Ocean Vuong and Brandon Taylor.