How I’ll Remember Edmund White

Photo: Rick McGinnis

In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon,” Edmund White wrote in City Boy. Five decades later, very little remains of the bare-knuckle, sexually overripe city that the author recalled in his memoirs and novels, but Ed still slept till noon.

Whenever I sent him an email or a text in the morning, I knew I wouldn’t receive an answer until midday. That delay was hardly an inconvenience: Our missives mainly consisted of swooning descriptions of young men with whom we were briefly infatuated...