When was Edmund White diagnosed with HIV? Health struggles explored as celebrated author dies at 85

Pioneering American author Edmund White, who was known for shaping American queer literature, has passed away at the age of eighty five. According to The Guardian, White, who was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984, had a long and successful literary career, having written more than thirty books.

Edmund White, whose death was confirmed by his agent, Bill Clegg, passed away on Tuesday evening at his home. According to New York Times, although no precise cause of death has been given, White experienced stomach ache before his death, as a result of "a vicious stomach bug," and was feeling weak.

More about Edmund White's health struggles, as the author of The Joy of Gay S*x passes away

Edmund White, who was born on January 13, 1940, grew up in Cincinnati along with his parents and siblings. He attended the University of Michigan and later relocated to New York. According to The Independent, he was present at the site of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the movement that would give birth to the modern American gay rights movement.

Edmund White was diagnosed with HIV in 1984, and in an interview with The Guardian, earlier this year, he recounted the moment he was informed about his diagnosis. He said,

"I wasn’t surprised, but I was very gloomy. I kind of pulled the covers over my head and thought: ‘Oh gee, I’ll be dead in a year or two.’ I did have a number of opportunistic diseases, like shingles, but it turned out that I was a slow progressor."

He added that the only reason he survived was the emergence of new drugs, although he had expected not to make it. He said,

"And by the time they got dangerously low [reffering to T-Cells] there were the new drugs, and so I survived. But I didn’t think I would.”

Edmund White, who co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis, an organization dedicated to combating the AIDS crisis, wrote in his book, The Unpunished Vice, that he suffered an heart attack in 2014. In an excerpt published by the bi-monthly magazine, Gay & Lesbian Review, taken from his memoir, Inside a Pearl: My Year's in Paris, he recounted the incident,

"I HAD a routine procedure a year ago in a famous New York hospital, a heart catheterization (when a wire is inserted up a vein into your heart to see if you have any blockages). My heart turned out to be fine but the wire apparently knocked loose some plaque, which brought on three small strokes in the pons, the top of the spine area, which controls many motor but not cognitive functions. Six months earlier I’d had a first, minor stroke of the same sort from which I’d thoroughly recovered in a week."

He added that after his stroke, his partner Michael Carroll took him to the hospital, as the author had difficulty in swallowing food. He said,

"This time my partner Michael first noticed something was wrong when I was unable to swallow food or liquid. (I’d not eaten anything since midnight as the hospital had specified, and now it was early afternoon.) In addition I had a hard time speaking. I was in a recovery room with dozens of other patients, but nothing could be done for me until the surgeon came by to see me."

Edmund White further said that he had to spend a long time in the hospital due to his stroke, adding that he had lost movement in the right side of his body, which required physical therapy to recover. He said,

"The stroke had affected my right side, so many of the exercises were designed to strengthen my right arm (which I could barely move) and my right leg (which ached constantly)."

Edmund White, who was also the author of the semi-autobiographical book A Boy's Own Story, taught Creative Writing at Princeton University, and was the recipient of several awards throughout his life. In 2019, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Foundation.

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Edmund White, who lived in New York, is survived by his husband, writer Michael Carroll, who was twenty five years his junior. The couple had met in the mid 1990s and later married in 2013.

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