What you are about to read is an American life as lived by renowned author Edmund White.  His life has been a crossroads, the fulcrum of high-brow Classicism and low-brow Brett Easton Ellisism.  It is not for the faint.  He has been the toast of the literary elite in New York, London and Paris, befriending artistic luminaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian McKellen while writing about a family where he was jealous his sister was having sex with his father as he fought off his mother's amorous pursuit.  
The fact is, Edmund White exists.  His life exists.  To the casual reader, they may find it disquieting that someone like his father existed in 1950's America and that White's work is the progeny of his intimate effort to understand his own experience.      
Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits.  Nothing was.  Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White's enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer.
David Shankbone:  What questions are you tired of answering?
DS:  Have you noticed your answers change much?
DS:  When you notice you are very flexible in your thought and change notions easily, does it have broader implications for you?
DS:  One interview I did was with a young novelist named John Reed—
DS:  Yes, married, kids.  But he feels a problem with creating a new generation of readers today is that the literary canon does not have many modern works at the grade school and high school level, and young readers feel disconnected from reading.
DS:  But what’s taught is not modern—
DS:  Augusten Burroughs is taught?
DS:  That would seem like racy material for grade school or high school.
DS:  Does it bother you to be considered a gay writer?
DS:  And you embrace that?
DS:  In England you have kids reading Afro-Caribbean literature because they don’t have a sense that it’s a “black thing”?
DS:  Do you see a generation that can assume the mantle for the Violet Quill or is there not a necessity for it?
DS:  Why?
DS:  What is a gay novel?
DS:  Would Hollinghurst’s Swimming Pool Library be one?
DS:  You think that’s because of a lack of a community of writers?
DS:  Earlier you were saying what makes a book a certain genre is a marketing function.
DS:  Who are some good gay writers?
DS:  You said in an interview that the smartest people are the best sex—
DS:  —what is sex to you?
DS:  How can something repeated so often still be considered sacred?
DS:  Do you only have sex once a week?
DS:  People don’t go to mass every day, typically.
DS:  They could.
DS:  Is that the main criterion for a partner?
DS:  You have an open relationship?
DS:  Do you think that’s a necessity in order to have a successful relationship?
DS:  Where do you tend to find your sexual partners?
DS:  Are you a slave or a master?
DS:  Why are you a bad slave?
DS:  At what point does it start to seem ridiculous?
DS:  [Laughs]
DS:  Are you always submissive?
DS:  You had a slave relationship.
DS:  What was that like?
DS:  What psychological issues come out in a relationship like that?
DS:  To give up the feeling they always have to be in control in their waking lives?
DS:  That must have been disappointing for him.  
DS:  What psychological issues did you work through in your slave-master relationships?
DS:  Did it used to be more so?
DS:  Like they are wearing Halloween costumes?
DS:  As if the fashion never changes?  It’s always the same chaps, the same harness…
DS:  In an interview you said that you are known for the incestuous feelings that were in your family—
DS:  —what advice would you give to couples pursuing an incestuous relationship?
DS:  Or a brother and sister.
DS:  Do you think there is a problem with it?
DS:  Is that because there is an intrinsic problem with it, or because of societal reactions to it?
DS:  So you’d advise an incestuous couple not to pursue it?
DS:  You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship.  You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him?
DS:  Where do you think that attraction came from?
DS:  But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one's father.
DS:  What you describe is power; are you still attracted to power?
DS:  Would you let him blow you?
DS:  Why not?
DS:  What did your father’s incestuous relationship with your sister do to you?
DS:  Did you try?
DS:  And he spurned you?
DS:  How would you respond?
DS:  Did he ever know?
DS:  What was his reaction?
DS:  Your mother was attracted to you, right?
DS:  [Laughs] The old doorknob adage? [Laughs]
DS:  Do you think that played a role in your being gay?
DS:  I interviewed an eminent psychoanalyst named Joseph Merlino and he said it’s a mixture of things—nature, nurture, both.
DS:  How so?
DS:  The courting rituals are similar between gays and straights.
DS:  Who are you supporting for President?
DS:  Would we benefit from having Bill Clinton back in the White House?
DS:  Nicolas Sarkozy: fascist or liberator?
DS:  So you have no issue with him?
DS:  How has the Iraq War affected you?’
DS:  Nadine Strossen is such a believer.  I guess you need to be a believer to be President of the ACLU.  What trait do you deplore in yourself?
DS:  You have to choose whether to blow up China or India, and if you do not choose then they both go.  They are roughly equal in population according to their last censuses; which do you choose?
DS:  So is China.
DS:  It’s more cohesive now, but China, once the Communist Party loses its grip on power, it’s going to fall apart.
DS:  You have Muslim provinces, you have Tibet.  You have problems in the south with the north.  Hong Kong.  You don’t think that there will be a domino effect that when one goes, the others will go?
DS:  So the age of the end of the empire won’t touch China?  It won’t be a Soviet Union?
DS:  What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
DS:  Why did he drop you?
DS:  How does having a relationship like that fit in yours and Michael’s?
DS:  Do you think not articulating it is what makes it work?
DS:  Do you always practice safe sex?
DS:  But there’s different strains of the virus, correct?
DS:  You’ve never known of anyone who has said, “Oh, now I have a different strain and none of the drugs are working.”
DS:  What difficulties have you encountered physically from being HIV positive?  Has it been a difficult row to hoe?
DS:  Why did you start?
DS:  How would you like to die if you could choose your own death?
DS:  What about dying consciously makes you uncomfortable?
DS:  You could be hit by a train.
DS:  Do you believe in a higher power?
DS:  If you’re going to sin, you’re going to fuck the devil?
DS:  What’s your favorite curse word?
DS:  Have you ever altered your opinion of somebody based upon their star sign?
DS:  What would you find a bigger turn-off in bed:  somebody who was flatulent or somebody who spoke in a baby voice?
DS:  Is that one especially repellent to you?
DS:  What trait do you deplore in other people?
DS:  What do you value most in your friends.
DS:  What role do you think you play in the gay community?
DS:  Do you have a relationship with Larry Kramer at all?
DS:  Why?
DS:  What did he say?
DS:  But up until then—before that, you had been…
DS:  Why were you so vulnerable?

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Edmund White on writing, incest, life and Larry Kramer