The next time you have great gay sex, you can thank Edmund White

The gay community suffered a big loss when Edmund White, the pioneering American author and chronicler of gay life, passed away this week at the age of 85. While his literary contributions are vast and vital, perhaps none is as culturally seismic as The Joy of Gay Sex, the 1977 manual he coauthored with psychologist Charles Silverstein.

Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.

This groundbreaking work did more than offer a guide to intimacy. That would sound too simplistic. The book shattered the silence surrounding gay sexuality and offered a beacon of knowledge and acceptance during a time of ignorance, fear, and criminalization. I was probably about 10 years removed from being able to buy and appreciate the book, but I always knew it was a gay culture touchstone.

The Joy of Gay Sex was unapologetically frank, explicit, and affirming. it demystified gay intimacy for a generation that had been kept in the dark. It wasn’t just about sex positions (though it had plenty of those). It offered practical advice on cruising, coming out, dealing with rejection, navigating relationships, and finding community.

It treated gay men not as cautionary tales but as human beings worthy of pleasure, safety, and love. That had never been done before.

That’s because before and after The Joy of Gay Sex, gay men were raised almost exclusively within a framework of heterosexual desire. If a teenager, like myself, received "the talk," it was the birds and the bees, encompassing male and female anatomy, marriage, reproduction. When I got “the talk,” I remember not caring in the least, and not fully understanding why.

There were no birds on birds or bees on bees — about what to do if you were attracted to your best friend or the guy in your school locker room. For me, that happened in eighth grade. I remember seeing one of my friends undress and feeling a rush over me that I had trouble understanding.

Then, when I was in high school, I got round 2 on straight sex. I couldn't raise my hand in class to ask about anal sex, kissing another boy, or what it meant to be a top or a bottom.

If you were a gay boy, you couldn’t turn to your parents for clarity. That was out of the question. To do so would have been to invite shame, suspicion, or worse. Gay sex was not only invisible; it was forbidden. And that’s why, I think, so many of us of a certain age have had some sort of an issue with gay sex throughout our lives. Part of me still thinks of it as somewhat immoral.

Also, there was that haunting, unspeakable specter of sexual abuse by priests, which happened to me and many, many others, that further warped our interpretation of our sexuality.

When The Joy of Gay Sex hit shelves in 1977, it was instantly recognizable as a bold riff on the 1972 best seller The Joy of Sex, which had introduced straight America to its own bedroom with hand-drawn illustrations and a breezy, liberated tone. Straight people who enjoyed sex were no doubt overjoyed.

But for young gay men, The Joy of Sex was another book that assumed they didn’t exist. Like the sex ed classes and after-school lectures about “waiting until marriage,” it spoke only to heterosexual desire. It was framed as pleasure only between a man and a woman, and it erased queer bodies entirely.

The Joy of Gay Sex flipped that script. It had the same format, but this time the models looked like us. And if you were old enough to understand and to buy it, the questions were ours, and finally, so were the answers.

You have to remember what those days were like for men who wanted to have sex with men. In the void left by schools, families, and mainstream culture, many gay men sought understanding and connection through perilous and clandestine means. Parks, piers, public restrooms, and bathhouses became places of refuge and risk.

However, if you were caught, you risked arrest, outing, job loss, or violence. In 1964, Walter Jenkins, a top aide to President Lyndon Johnson, was arrested for “disorderly conduct” after being caught with another man in a YMCA restroom in Washington, D.C.

When I moved to D.C. and met my first gay friend, he told me that story, and it shook me. He warned about the consequences of being caught having gay sex. The scandal ended Jenkins’s political career overnight. His fall wasn't unique. Similar fates befell countless men whose names never made headline, but whose lives were wrecked by the mere act of seeking affection or release.

Even worse, In films and television, gay sex, or even the suggestion of it, was depicted as something depraved, criminal, or tragic. Think of The Detective (1968), where Frank Sinatra’s character investigates a gay man’s murder and we glimpse a shadowy world filled with shame and violence. Or Midnight Cowboy (1969), where male-male encounters are transactional, pathetic, or pathologized.

Sex between men, when it appeared at all, was for the most part closeted in darkness, tinged with despair. There was no joy in it, no dignity, and certainly no instruction manual. Of course there were a few exceptions, like A Very Natural Thing, but that was hardly for a mainstream audience.

For many, The Joy of Gay Sex was the first source of truth. It validated desires many had buried, replacing shame with knowledge and fear with confidence. It told gay men they weren’t alone and that sex wasn’t a sin or a secret but a joyful, essential part of being human.

White’s coauthorship of that book is just one piece of his legacy. His novels, especially A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty, explored gay boyhood and coming of age with a lyrical honesty that was unprecedented. He became not just a writer but a witness, charting the evolution of gay life from the shadows of mid-century America through the sexual liberation of the 1970s and into the devastation of the AIDS crisis.

He gave gay men the language, the images, the legitimacy to say we exist, we love, we have sex, and here’s how to do it joyfully and safely.

So the next time you have gay sex, alone or with a partner, in the light or in the dark, you can thank Edmund White for all the fun you had.

Voices is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Visit Advocate.com/submit to learn more about submission guidelines. Views expressed in Voices stories are those of the guest writers, columnists, and editors, and do not directly represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.