Thought For The Day: Edmund White

I think I’m a fairly good writer, but I’m not that well-known, because of what I call the cock-and-balls problem. People don’t want to read about it. People have gotten really puritanical. Or not that, but hypocritical. All the gays are getting married and adopting children and pretending to be respectable members of the PTA—and they’re all on Grindr constantly. Don’t you think? I think boys will be boys, and all these gays who are trying to be so domestic and respectable—well, the animalistic comes out of them every once in a while.

Ed White talking to Seattle's The Stranger about a new production of Terre Haute, his play about Timothy McVeigh and Gore Vidal.

Grandpa White says he had the hots for McVeigh, and Gore threatened to sue.

PS She's doing a book signing at Gay's The Word this Sunday.

Edmund White: Horrified

My mother was a psychologist. She’d test us all the time. I always did very well, between 140 and 170, I think. But she was horrified by my responses to the Rorschach test. I just saw diamonds and dead people.

Edmund White, FT Weekend Q&A. 

Fagburn gets horrified whenever he's tried to read one of your dreadful flowery self-centred books. 

David Sedaris: Freak Out!

I don’t feel I tailor to the crowd. If I write about Hugh, for instance, I write in the sense of trying to make a life with someone in a way everyone can relate to it. I’m not hiding anything. Sex just isn’t my subject. I remember I was in Paris and Edmund White did a reading at this place called the Village Voice Bookshop. The audience was maybe 10% gay people, and when he read you could see people were like, “He just talked about sucking somebody’s dick; I didn’t sign up for this.” I don’t think it’s fair that they freaked out. When a straight couple kisses in a movie you don’t see us go, “ewww.” So, on the one hand, it only seems fair. But I just don’t write that way. In that story, [“A Guy Walks Into a Bar Car”] I felt like anybody could relate. It’s just a story about an opportunity that you didn’t take, and for the rest of your life when things get bad you think, “If only I would’ve picked that person up.” When you’re brooding over an alcoholic straight guy, that’s when you’ve hit bottom.

David Sedaris in an entertaining interview with Lambda Literary.
Much interesting stuff also about his fagcent, his fans and his father.

Edmund White: Cock-And-Balls Stories

"I started ruminating about sex writing while thinking about..." [Sniiiiip!]

That's quite enough, Ed.
Thanks. 

Fagburn: Celebrity Gossip Special

The Sunday broadsheets are lightly sprinkled with the magical stardust of interviews with gayer celebs today.
The Sunday Times serves up Zachary Quinto; "Quietly impressive as Spock in Star Trek, Zachary Quinto on making a bang as the first openly gay American movie star".
Natch Mr Quinto talks about coming out - “I didn’t tell anybody I was going to do it. I didn’t tell my agent, I didn’t tell my business partners, I didn’t tell my publicists..." - and the Hollywood closet.
The Sunday Times' Tom Shone writes;

'Despite its public avowals of liberalism, Hollywood’s history with homosexuality has been frightful. One thinks of the blackmailing of Rock Hudson, the hounding of Tab Hunter, the alcoholic demise of Montgomery Clift. Straight actors such as Tom Hanks, Sean Penn and Colin Firth win praise and awards for the “bravery” needed to play gay, as long as the char­acter ends up in the dumpster — Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, features a “necrology” of gay characters’ on-screen deaths — but woe betide the gay actor within a mile radius of heart-throb status who decides to come out.
“The torment those people feel — and I know it because I’ve seen it, I know it in people — is so heavy, so painful,” Quinto says. “Things need to change. This is just bullshit at a certain point. I’m not going to live my life based on fear of other people’s judgments. If somebody doesn’t want to work with me because I’m gay, then I don’t want to work with them anyway.” Still, one can’t help wondering about mainstream audiences — the soda-sucking multiplexers and burping mall rats. I ask if his decision, or the factors that weighed into it, might have been different had he been playing Kirk, rather than Spock...'

Just between you, me and the bedbugs, Fagburn thinks Mr Shone's last two sentences there are snobbish and quite, quite daft.
Antony Sher was interviewed by The Observer; "I was gay. Jewish. A white South African," he says. "And for different reasons, I was ashamed of all those things." As a result, he suggests, the actors he most admired were those who best masked themselves on stage: "Olivier, Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness."
Mr Sher said something rather similar to The Guardian last year.
Incidentally, the actor he most admires these days is Judi Dench - go figure.
Edmund White told Observer readers This Much I Know.
Ed's turned into the gay Norman Mailer, really; the grand old man of letters, desperate to tell the world that old age has not withered his all-conquering libido.
And boy, girls, does Ed like to drop names; "Some of the best advice I've been given is from Truman Capote..."
Mr White's top - namedropping, self-mythologising, possibly made-up - showbiz anecdote; "Competition among writers is a strange thing. Years ago, Gore Vidal was with Johnathan Burnham from Chatto at the River Café and they used to have these big tall bottles of olive oil on the table. He mistook one for wine, poured himself a glass and drank it. He spluttered it all out and said to Jonathan: 'You saw that and you didn't stop me. You want me to die so your writer Edward White will be King Fag!'"
Gripping stuff all round, I'm sure you'll agree.