Edmund White in his Paris apartment, August 1996
photo by James Dowell
Edmund White is one of the most articulate literary voices of our time. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his definitive biography of Jean Genet and, at the same time, his fiction has been full of a fresh and honest voice, making him one of the principal creators of the current gay literary renaissance. His Genet biography also won the Lambda Literary Award. Our biographical film will explore his life and work from his youth in Cincinnati and Texas, through his teaching in the hothouse world of Ivy League English departments and including his expatriate years in Paris.
Mr. White has offered us his complete cooperation in the making of our film. We plan to create visual interpretations with actors of aspects of his fiction writing, drawing on, among other sources, his biographical novel A Boy's Own Story and his elegy in the time of the AIDS crisis, The Beautiful Room is Empty. We will also find visual equivalents for his non-fiction, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America and a number of his incisive essays. We have already interviewed Ned Rorem for the film as well as White himself and his long-standing partner Michael Carroll. We intend to interview any number of other literary figures to put White's life and work in context.His most recent book, My Lives, is a candid memoir organized in a fresh non-chronological way.