The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

by Edmund White, Joel Froomkin (narrator), Bloomsbury Publishing (publisher)

Bloomsbury presents The Loves of My Life by the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex. Read by Joel Froomkin.

A VULTURE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“In his panoply of sexual encounters, Edmund White’s love of sex makes us proud to be human. And the story of his sex life reads like a beautifully crafted, very moving (and very funny!) novel.” —John Irving

"A raw, frightening, funny, and beautiful testimony, brimming with transgressive wisdom." —Robert Jones, Jr.

I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them—for me it would be thousands of sex partners.
The 85-year-old “paterfamilias of queer literature” (New York Times) recounts the sixty-plus years of sexual escapades that have inspired his many masterpieces. He explores the sex he had with other closeted boys of the 50s Midwest, with women as a young man trying to be straight, the sex he’s paid for and been paid for, sex during the Stonewall and HIV eras, and in the age of the apps. Through tales of transactional sex, mutual admiration, open relationships, domination, submission, love, and loss, he paints an indelible portrait of queer history in America and abroad in a way only someone who has lived through it can.

Written with White’s signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of a legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.

Genres: Memoir, Queer, LGBT, Nonfiction, Gay, Biography, Biography Memoir

Audible Audio

First published January 28, 2025

About the author

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

White himself calls this a "queer bildungsroman", and while that's debatable, "The Loves of My Life" certainly captivates as a memoir that ponders the adventures and exploits of the 85-year-old author since the 1950's: From the repressive American Midwest during the Eisenhower years over the Stonewall riots (which the author witnessed) to the AIDS crisis, from experiences in France, Spain and England to modern-day digital realms, White introduces us a to a fraction of his (as he claims) 3,000+ lovers. Teenage encounters, hustlers, orgies in trucks, cruising, open relationships with very different men, you name it, White has anecdotes about it. And timid he is not.

What intrigued me is how White writes about gay desire and how ideals changed over time in relation to historical and sociological circumstances: He expertly connects his personal attitudes and preferences with the goings-on in the world around him, and as this is not a history book, but a personal exploration, he has no interest in political correctness or putting subjective attitudes into perspective, which, frankly, not only highlights the author's constantly developing personality, but also heightens the entertainment factor. White wittily ruminates about the connections between sex, love, and friendship, and delivers quite some astute observations.

So is it a bildungsroman? According to the classic model of the genre (based on Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), the youthful protagonist of such a text is collecting character-defining experiences to finally be socialized into society and become an upstanding citizen. As a queer artist, White is part of a movement that has fought the demand to bend to such standards, and rather contributed to changing them, and thus society. So a classic bildungsroman it is not; rather, it underlines how a person and a changing world interact, expanding ideas of agency and networks of change. No wonder White shouts out Pajtim Statovci, Garth Greenwell, and Édouard Louis (and I read everything by all of them, because I agree with White: They are amazing).

Intriguing, illuminating, fun and raunchy. We need more historical sex memoirs by senior citizens.

[Daniel Myatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh, once you'd heard one sex anecdote, you'd heard all of them and this book had MANY!

I'm all for being sex positive and have no problem listening to sexual adventures but I honestly was hoping for more of a social history rather then lists of men Edmund White went with, and also I'm pretty sure poetic licence is being taken here as I dont think all the men he went with had dicks like pythons 🙄

It passed the time on my commute to work 😅 but I'll stick to his fiction.

[James Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

kinda surprised by the low reviews… people hate to see a bottom succeed

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Violet Quill lives on ...

Review to follow.

[Shurochka · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got precisely what was advertised - a sex memoir. Nothing more. Very raw and honest but I won't recommend it to anyone unless they're fans of the author (I am not, thus the two stars).

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 3 out of 5]

RIP Edmund White, whose bibliography of novels, memoirs and biographies is about as long as my arm; this last book of his is pithy, funny, not especially deep or full of Wisdom, but an entertaining summary of sexcapades and love affairs over his pretty prolific 85-year run. The best parts of this book are those where White talks about his several decades of fucking as an older man--marking the transition from clone era beauty to silverdaddies bottom-- and the frankness with which he talks about his preference for hustlers.

Three stars because I always want more wisdom from an old gay guy than someone like White can really give. He's not a revolutionary, though in the 70s he was culturally far forward of most of America. He lacks certain kinds of self reflection: he knows about racial injustice, used to identify as a socialist, and has definitely seen the gay rights movement prioritize white gay assimilationists and leave behind everyone else. He says as much, and his analysis of Stonewall is useful and spot-on. When it comes to making the personal political, though, or talking about his life from the perspective of someone holding racial power and being a cultural snob, it's harder. White is from a lost era, a Midwestern transplant elder who watched NYC change over five decades with surprising luck and also significant trauma from his abusive family that was too-typical of WASP america; he likes mean, non-demonstrative tops, and he claims that into old age, he has enjoyed it when men are jealous or possessive or even abusive to the point of throwing dishes. He says repeatedly that he thinks a lot of marriages between equals are sexless. He has lived long enough to have absorbed new definitions of consent and reflects, usefully I think, on the times he has been on the receiving end of assault and when he pressured or pursued others who didn't appreciate it--very interesting from someone who is so much part of another time+standard for consent practices-- but he's kind of allergic to voicing any serious/earnest beliefs or principles around hot-button issues such as MeToo and its aftereffects, pornography, youth transition, young queer people's autonomy etc, and his defense of sex work is pretty client-oriented, as much as I agree with him that paying people for sex who are consensually selling is not unethical. He's just not trying to write a political book.

I appreciate his oeuvre of books and content about teenage sexuality (his own); he avoids making more of his own experiences than a reflection of his individual selfhood. He indicates that he knows it's considered retro or in bad taste for him or other white men to have a yen for, for example, masculine Latino tops with anger issues, who show up as kind of stone reliefs, their desires and pains sketched but not delved deep into. He doesn't seem to have any desire to think particularly hard about why he tends to depict his non-white lovers from before 1990 as more or less exotic goldfish or puppy dogs or frightening Adonises to describe physically, where white lovers tend to get both the physical rundown and the mental empathy of long friendships (the exception is his chaste love affair with a much younger Asian man, a phd student, when he is older). Generously, perhaps it's because the Latino men he's fucked are total tops, and he's only friends with bottoms? But I think he's just kind of racist, despite voicing support for multicultural gay pride and civil rights for much of his career. This is something I had issues with in Our Young Man too.

For White, all of life is there to have its marrow sucked out-- he's a culturally erudite hedonist, and he can turn a great phrase and has an old dame's appreciation for, gratitude for, her many loves. He was very influential when I read him as a teen. I have a soft spot for his fiction and for his biographical prose.

The girl's an antique-- I think what's in here that's fun is the glance into another, dated way of relating to one's sexuality combined with an awareness of where culture has gone during the time he's been alive. I do notice that White, despite being part of the gay lib generation, is at heart a pre-stonewall artifact, and I think maybe he's being more honest here than he was in City Boys or States of Desire about his own modernity and egalitarianism. He's basically a 19th-century gay4trade dude, and all his literary models are a hundred years older than him. It's funny to see how this sometimes puts him out of step with current gay guy stuff and sometimes puts him right in the middle. For example, White was introduced relatively late in life to talking about his hole as a "pussy" and thinks of it as a new term that men of his generation would never have used, finding it too degrading; he has an elderly gay guy's crude and potentially misogynist "menstrual associations" with the term, but discovers, when a lover introduces this verbal play, that he's really into it. The delight he takes in bottoming is sweet to read about. He also knows what furries and ABDL practitioners are. He talks about his extortion and betrayal of older men he had sex with as an adolescent, and says he behaved badly but he thinks a sick culture produces sick behavior (he refuses to condemn the older men who he had encounters with). He tried SM in the 70s, had a couple relationships as a submissive and a couple as a dom, and basically got bored with it. He talks about his oral practices, which feel retro in their association of position with functionally a kind of gender within a gender.

Listen to grandma; know her limits. If only all queers had such insouciance and wit, if not wisdom, at such an advanced age; if only all queers had such a wealth of texts to hand off when they journey into the beyond.

[Merilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

If your partner has eyes 'as blue and white as the Swedish flag', you should take him to the A&E instead of fucking him.

[Liam Ostermann]

This is Edmund White's latest book, but actually his last book because he has died and will write no more. Under the circumstances I am posting thoughts on White, not all my own, but even those that aren't express what I feel, think and would have said if I could have.

"‘I thought,’ White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony (1997), ‘that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the 50s, freed in the 60s, exalted in the 70s, and wiped out in the 80s.’ He was describing, as he always did, the generation of gay men of which he was a part. To his and our luck, he survived, living to be applauded in the 90s, unjustly overlooked in the 00s, and rediscovered in the 10s and the 20s by a new generation of gays for whom prophylactic antiretrovirals have brought back the industrial sexual liberation he wrote about in his novels.

"White described that sexual liberation in some of the most extraordinary prose this side of Henry James. His early novella Nocturnes for the King of Naples, more abstract and experimental than the novels for which he is better known, opens with several pages describing men cruising on the Christopher Street piers in New York City:

"'Congeries of bodies; the slow, blind tread on sloped steps; the faces floating up like thoughts out of ink; then trailing away like thoughts out of memory; entrances and exits; the dignified advance and retreat as an approaching car on the highway outside casts headlights through the window and plants a faint square on the wall. The square brightens til it blazes, then rotates into a trapezoid narrowing to the point of extinction, its last spark igniting a hand raised to hit a face. A new square grows on the wall but when it veers off it rears not the stunned face, nor the punishing hand – ooze on old boards, nothing else.'

I read this work when I was 19 or 20, away from my Dublin home for the first time and beginning my life in London, it wasn't my first 'gay' book but it was close, it was definitely my first work of literature that was 'gay' - note I do not say 'gay' literature White is not a gay writer he is a writer of great novels, of great literature. That is why his books are not defined nor are of interest only to those who knew the post Stonewall world they come from. It is why his 'Farewell Symphony' is the novel about AIDS which will be read when readers need an explanation of what AIDS was in the same way that the Black Death has to be explained. But it won't matter because what he wrote in 'A Farewell Symphony' was not merely reportage it is a chronicle of life that outlast its circumstances in the way the novels of Henry James or Marcel Proust do.

It is worth remembering that even thirty years after Stonewall how homophobic the literary discourse remained. "John Updike opened a review of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1998 novel The Spell in the New Yorker with the complaint that Hollinghurst’s novels are ‘relentlessly gay’ and lack the ‘chirp and swing and civilising animation’ of ‘a female’. In gay fiction, Updike went on, ‘nothing is at stake but self-gratification’; even the most frivolous heterosexual writing, he proposed, was ‘sacralised’ by the ‘institution of the family’ and the ‘perpetuation of the species’. It is presumably such sacred bonds that Updike had in mind when he wrote, in The Widows of Eastwick (2008): ‘She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face ... Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room.’

"Two years earlier, James Wolcott wrote in the Wall Street Journal that The Farewell Symphony, the third part of White’s magisterial trilogy of gay life beginning with A Boy’s Own Story,had ‘a rather fancy title for a book that might have been more honestly called Hilly Buttocks I Have Known’. For Wolcott, a novel describing in rich prose the coming together in ecstatic communion and fast, painful, untimely death of a generation was ‘trashy’ gossip. Proposing that gay promiscuity requires a ‘defence’, Wolcott, in a sentence dripping with disdain, wrote that White ‘crams the page with such graphic, gross, non-stop, indiscriminate, inside-gayworld flutter and abandon that giving the characters names seems a mere courtesy, they’re such interchangeable receptacles’.

"But The Farewell Symphony, which borrows its title from Haydn, is full of brilliantly specific characterisation. One character, named Butler, is described as keeping ‘carbons of all his letters, which were obviously written with one eye on posterity, full of nature descriptions, lengthy impressions of historical monuments he’d visited and reflections on current social problems, all adorned with appropriate tags from Horace or Boileau’. Another, Sergio, encountered in a garden in Venice, has ‘a big, comic smile that was out of phase with his eyes, as though he were wearing a commedia dell’arte half-mask ... He had a prominent jaw and his face looked as though it were flooded with blood. Laugh lines flowed away from his eyes like the tails of colliding comets.’ ‘Interchangeable receptacles’?

"Writing these men as human beings was at the centre of White’s literary project. The narrator of The Farewell Symphony recalls: ‘I can still remember the joy in certain quarters when the “fags” started to die. It was not withheld. Not at all, it was a joyous, prancing, self-righteous, far-right victory lap.’"

How wonderful it would be to believe that those days and views are past but I have yet to look at the reviews on GR or elsewhere of any 'gay' novel which is actually written by a gay man and unafraid of describing their world which does not attract the fluttering of virginal distaste at the mention of penises or spunk.

That Edmund White survived for new generations of readers to discover and to continue writing brilliant inventive books is a miracle. Quite how unique White's talent is only becomes obvious when you see how few writers of White's generation, never mind later ones, have produced an oeuvre of similar significance and quality.

Everyone has to die and every death diminishes us all but, perhaps the sky god I don't believe in does have a sense of humour because while his acolytes were celebrating the apparent demise of 'gays' from his non existent wrath he allowed White to survive so gays could never be forgotten. Whether we should thank God for White's life is doubtful - but I am deeply thankful for it nonetheless.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s pretty bold in America’s current climate to publish a gay sex memoir. I, of course, came to this one for the dishy gossip, but stayed for White’s take on a New York that hasn’t existed for a while, his literary call outs and insights on aging and sexuality.

[Derek Driggs · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have all the gratitude for Edmund White’s career and legacy as really one of the “founding fathers” of the American gay literary scene, whose longevity meant he was a contemporary with James Baldwin AND the modern likes of Ocean Vuong et al. I also respect his sex positivity and the theme of celebrating gay intimacy throughout his work. But I really didn’t jive with this one. The many encounters that he reminisces over here would, to me, be the stuff of nightmares 😅.

[William R. Langley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very definition of uninhibited — I’ve never read anything quite like it. Incredibly open and bold. A no holds barred account of his many adventures and musings — a truly beautiful handling of love and lust regardless of age, preference, or status. As someone else said already, Edmund White is owed a great deal for writing what most would be afraid to put on paper. This marks the second book of his that I’ve read (my first was a humble lover) … now just 30 more to go!

[Joel Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listen, I don’t think of myself as a prude but oy!

[Dalton Snyder · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars seems excessively high. Nonetheless, it’s a memoir and I feel weird judging it based on stars anyhow. This was weird on a lot of levels. It’s a memoir, as I said, but specifically recounting the sex the author has had throughout his life. But aside from a few parts, the stories all seemed to blur together, yet another blowjob or yet another big dick, with little back story and even less thought on the experience or what it meant. Similarly, the author, who is boastful about his age, as he’s in his eighties, has a very weird obsession with boys, and even wrote: “By the minute, he became more and more boyish until soon I had a 13 year-old in my arms, not a 40-year-old man.” I don’t need to explain why that’s not great, right?

Perhaps it’s my own fault for going into this book without any knowledge of the author or what it was about. With a gay author who has lived through decades of history, through Stonewall itself, through the AIDS crisis, and into the current political climate, I assumed there’d be more depth and intentionality behind penning a memoir exclusively about gay sex. Yet, by the end, all I know is that he’s a greedy bottom who loves to be on his knees. Unfortunate.

[Eric De Feo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent writing. Not for straight ppl to read but they should support the queer economy and gift the book to gay male friends.

[Muhammed Zuhrabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

എഡ്മണ്ട് വൈറ്റ് എന്ന എഴുത്തുകാരൻ ജീവിച്ചിരുന്നു എന്ന് ഞാൻ അറിയുന്നത് തന്നെ അദ്ദേഹത്തിൻ്റെ മരണ ശേഷം മാത്രമാണ്. നമ്മുടെ അറിവില്ലായ്മകളോട് നമുക്ക് പുച്ഛം തോന്നുന്ന ഒരു നിമിഷം. വൈറ്റിൻ്റേതായി ആദ്യമായി വായിക്കുന്നത് My First European എന്ന ഓർമ്മകുറിപ്പാണ്. പിന്നീട് ആദ്യകാല നോവലുകൾ വായിക്കാൻ ശ്രമിക്കുകയും ഒന്നു രണ്ട് പേജുകൾക്കപ്പുറം പരാജയപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്തു. അങ്ങനെയാണ് വീണ്ടും ഓർമ്മക്കുറിപ്പുകളിലേക്ക് തന്നെ തിരികെ എത്തിയത്. The Loves of My Life എന്ന പുസ്തകം ലിംഗവർണ്ണനകളിൽ നിന്ന് തുടങ്ങുകയും അനേകം പാളികളുള്ള മനുഷ്യരിലേക്ക് പടരുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. ഒരു മനുഷ്യനെ പരിചയപ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിന് മുമ്പ് വൈറ്റ് അയാളുടെ ലൈംഗിക അവയവങ്ങളേയും ശരീരത്തേയും പരിചയപ്പെടുത്തുന്നു. വീമ്പു പറയുന്നു എന്നു തന്നെ വേണമെങ്കിൽ പറയാം. പ്രേമമില്ലാതെ ഒരുവനേയും തൊട്ടിട്ടില്ല എന്ന് ശപഥം ചെയ്യുന്നു. ദശകങ്ങളിൽ നിന്ന് ദശകങ്ങളിലേക്ക് ശരീരങ്ങളിലൂടെ മുന്നോട്ടും പിന്നോട്ടും യാത്ര ചെയ്യുന്നു.

ഇങ്ങനെ ഒരു വായന ആദ്യമായിട്ടാണ്. സെക്സിനെകുറിച്ച് എഴുതുമ്പോൾ ഒരതിരു വരച്ചുതന്നെയാണ് നമ്മുടെ എഴുത്തുകാർ എഴുതിത്തുടങ്ങാറുള്ളത്. അപ്പോൾ പിന്നെ എഴുത്തിലെ സ്വവർഗരതിയുടെ പ്രച്ഛന്നത ഒരു അത്ഭുതമേയല്ല. ഒരിക്കലും എഴുതപ്പെടാതിരിക്കുമ്പോൾ ആ വികാരത്തെ രൂപപ്പെടുത്താൻ സഹായിക്കുന്ന ഭാഷയെതെന്നെയാണ് നമ്മൾ നഷ്ടമാക്കുന്നത്. അതിലൂടെ ഭാവിയിലെ അതിൻ്റെ ഓർമ്മപ്പെടുത്തലുകളേയും എഴുത്തുകളേയും തന്നെ. വൈറ്റിൻ്റെ ഭാഷക്ക് തട്ടും തടവുമില്ല. വാക്കുകൾക്ക് പന്നമില്ല. വിഷയദാരിദ്രമില്ല. ഇടിത്തീ പോലെ നമ്മളെ അത്ഭുതപ്പെടുത്താൻ മറക്കുന്നുമില്ല. നെഞ്ചിൽ മാത്രമല്ല, അയാൾ തുടകൾക്കിടയിലും തീ കോരിയിടുന്നു. അടുത്ത നിമിഷം ദാക്ഷിണ്യമില്ലാതെ അതിനെ കെടുത്തുന്നു. ഓർമ്മപ്പെടുത്തുന്നു. തുടരുന്നു.

[marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

zdalam sobie sprawe ze to pierwsza ksiazka starszej osoby queerowej (ktora dozyla naszych czasow) z jaka mialam do czynienia i bardzo mnie to zasmucilo

[Bethany Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Bloomsbury publishing for a digital copy to review!

This memoir was incredibly interesting. Edmund White certainly had a wild life, and he’s a funny writer. He has a wit and charm that comes through the book and there’s also an undercurrent of sadness/self loathing.

This is not a linear memoir - it jumps around to different people he had sex with and the impact of it. He also briefly discusses his childhood and writing career. It reads like a steam of consciousness which does give the memoir a must read quality.

I overall enjoyed it!

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Harumph.

I knew it would be sordid.
Heck, I HOPED it would be sordid.

But I was hoping for the kind of sordid that would make me want to go out to the Pumpjack on Sunday night and flirt with younger men (and most are) and then pity the ones who don’t flirt back.

Instead, it was the kind of sordid that made me want to scour my flesh with a loofah in a scalding shower.

[River Crabbe]

In the acknowledgements, Edmund White names that this memoir is a bit like letting him ramble with a brandy after dinner. He couldn't have said it better. While the book is lacking something in terms of form and cohesion, it's a pleasure to sit at his knee and hear of the MANY sleazy and occasionally questionable forays he's had over the years. Good fun.

[Dylan New · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I'm afraid I'd fall in love with you. I've cried enough.”

RIP Ed, you truly lit the way.

[Michal.F · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this memoir certainly lived up to its title.

[Bin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ Every time I would think he had such interesting insight as an old gay man he would say just the most depraved thing you could think of

[Kevin Eggleston · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Edmund’s death a lifelong dream dies hard, but to read about others who achieved it was the next best thing. RIP

[Mediaman · Rating 1 out of 5]

This supposedly great gay author must be punking us--Edmund White cavalierly tosses togethers a nonsense journal touching on a few of his thousands of sexual conquests, admits to all sorts of criminal behavior (from paying for sex to having underage boys), and we're supposed to take the guy seriously?

It's horribly written, terribly edited (if done at all), and proves that so-called "professional writers" and some gays can just phone it in when putting together a memoir thinking that a little sex talk satisfies their audience.

He starts with this: "I'm at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them--for me it would be thousands of sex partners...we (Americans) think about sex constantly." Do you trust a guy who sleeps with thousands, claims people in our country are "prudish" for not accepting paid or underage sex as normal, believes every person thinks non-stop about sex, and brags that sex to him is the same thing as love?

White bemoans the days when same-sex desires were considered a mental illness and claims today's normalization of all forms of perversions has finally given the LGBTQ community happiness but then points out that half of all young adult homosexuals are suicidal, the highest rate ever. Sorry, sir, but no matter how "normal" you try to make extreme non-monogamy, or blame society for not going far enough, sexually imbalanced people are going to feel bad about themselves because internally they know sex doesn't equal the love they're looking for.

He started hiring men for sex when he was 16, the son of a well-off family with a maid and cars he was given to cruise the city. His stories of bedding different guys get boring quickly because it's so poorly written or contains no real dramatic narrative. He jumps back and forth to different sex partners during different times of his life, to the point that it often makes no sense.

White seems to be aware of his bad writing form because in the middle he writes, "I can't proceed entirely chronologically, since desire does not obey any timetable." HUH? What kind of logic is that? Namely, his horniness and memories jump around to different bodies over different eras, so screw any attempt at following a timeline like a real writer would!

He wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars on his tricks (including flying guys in and housing them), admitting that it was because it put him "in control" while allowing these paid studs to abuse him. "I knew something was seriously wrong with me, that I was abnormal. I toyed with the idea that I was superior, as many gays once did." Yes, what's with that anyway? Self-loathing and thinking you're better than others at the same time? If anything, this diary is evidence against happiness for those that are out and claim to be proud.

He also tells of how he voluntarily went to a shrink to try to figure out why he was suicidal and unhappy! Ha! He says she "was trying to cure me of homosexuality, though she saw my sex life as nothing more than a symptom of a deeper disorder." Well, join the rest of us in thinking that, Edmund White. Your book proves that you have severe mental issues, starting with the title of this being about "the loves" of your life when in truth you broke all legal and moral laws to have sex with thousands out of pure narcissistic love for your selfish appetites.

[Adrian Shanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeremy athertin Lin described this book as “daddy’s diary fully delivers” and if I told you that’s an understatement you may not believe me but it’s true.

“A job is just a refractory period between orgasms; Socializing is just a tease, a delay before serious fucking. Despite my frivolous tone, I recognize that stonewall inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity, their dignity, their rights. This victory permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring. We could build our marriages, love our families, invest ourselves into our work, express ourselves in encoded novels and poems and in the thousand other endeavors created by human ingenuity. This freedom is something we will never relinquish.”

[Jack Percival · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a few issues with this one. On the good side, I thought it was interesting to see the similarities between how I talk about sex with my friends or how some gay guys talk about sex online and how the author described sex in different eras of his life, including growing up in the 40s and 50s. I would never consider myself prude, but I thought reading about how he described sex and other gays to be pretty vulgar. The author asserted that sex was one of the most defining things throughout his life, but it didn't come across like he valued it. When he described the loves of his life, it consistently leaned emotional and I could tell how much those connections meant to him. When describing a sexual encounter, it didn't even feel like he remembered much of it besides one vulgar detail. I think there could have been a route where he showed the value in sex. I also felt like the way in which he described thoughts and actions that I found to be quite despicable and disturbing to not have any remorse or change in thought. During one sexual encounter at a young age, he described what would in today's society be considered rape. The author didn't seem to describe this as anything but trying to make a move on another person because he physically needed it.

[Alex Juarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could not read a juicier memoir! Mr White has had thousands of gay sexual partners since the 1950s, and he spares little detail. Jumping between his adolescence, school years, and the almost dreamlike Post-Stonewall and Pre-AIDs decade, he recounts the many “loves of his life.”

“When I speak of the great love of my life, I don't mean the degree to which someone loved me. I mean how madly, desperately I was in love. Once when I was sobbing in public over my broken heart over some man or another, Joyce Carol Oates, friend and colleague at Princeton, asked me coolly how many men had I rejected and hurt? Of course in my egotism I hadn't kept track of that, though they must have been in the dozens. For me love was always passionate and one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual. Did I need that distance, that anguish, to contemplate the beloved and write about him?”

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written and episodic journey as White takes us through a couple key romances and sexual relationships from his life. I appreciated how early in White shares that he feels sexual dynamics are an engrossing and compelling way of portraying relationships that are frequently neglected in literature. He seems to hold very little back here, writing about his escapades with longing and energy, from a vantage point at which it seems he feels the active sexual part of his life is over. I would have liked more of cohesive narrative thread to take us through this--it ended up feeling too loosely curated for me. One thing I liked, though, is how fully open it is in describing White's kinks and sexual preferences. It sometimes feels inappropriate or unseemly, and that is where its honesty is. Here he is, here he was, with no sugarcoating. If you are a fan of White (I haven't read that much of him), this seems a lovely way to say goodbye.

[Jarrett Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a shame this was Edmund White's last published book before his death. This banal litany of sex acts, so repetitious and predictable you'll be yawning fifty pages in, had the potential to serve as a chronicle of the evolution of the gay male world from the 1950s to the 2020s. Yet what White tosses off to readers is the nasty recollections--lacking any structure or insight--of an elderly gay man longing for the days he was a quasi-predatory cock slut in NYC. I've read memoirs from porn stars, both gay and straight, that have more to offer than this book.

[Nick R · Rating 1 out of 5]

De schrijver, gay, 80+, schrijft openlijk over zijn vele sekspartners.
Het boek mist focus. Er wordt regelmatig uitgeweken naar zaken die niet te rijmen vallen met het hoofdthema. En soms sprinten we snel langs enkele van zijn partners, dan afvragende waarom deze überhaupt wel benoemt moesten worden?
Hetgeen leest eigenlijk weg als een roddelblad (maar dan voor theoretisch opgeleiden) en staat ook vol platte persoonlijke (humoristisch bedoelde?) overtuigingen.
Jammer, gezien het leven van de schrijver een periode omvat waarin de kijk op homoseksualiteit flink is veranderd. Een terugblik had met hem, als een schrijver, veel potentie.
Wel rauw en eerlijk maar het resultaat is een memoir met “random anecdotes after dinner over brandy” … heel veel brandy.