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" If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else. "

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" The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. State after state had legalized gay marriage, despite intense opposition from the religious right. "

Edmund White

Gay

Right

Long

" 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. "

" I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. "

" Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office. "

" Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy. "

" The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. "

" I've always deplored bad heterosexual values that dictate the minute a marriage is over the former partners no longer speak to each other; only straights could be so cruel and inhuman as to reject totally the person with whom they've shared their life for 20 or 30 years. "

" When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist. "

" I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to. "

" Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man. "

" One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. "

" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "

" It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark. "

" 'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics. "

" The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. "

" When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel. "

" I always feel I'm better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don't read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody. "

" I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. "

" While writing 'City Boy,' I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal. "

" I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others. "

" I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission. "

" I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession. "

" In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me. "

" Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. "

" AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. "

" Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught. "

" I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee. "

" Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard. "

Edmund White

Boy

Story

" In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going. "

" My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story. "