Edmund White writes about sex, talks less

​It’s one thing for author Edmund White to write this for his 2005 memoir My Lives:

“He still sat on top of me and burned his smooth knees into my biceps, he still force-fed his penis into my willing mouth, my hands still roamed over his hairless body …”

But talking about sexual conquests — which he writes about lustily in both memoirs and novels — is another story. The chubby 70-year-old White — one of America’s best-known gay authors —  dressed in a blue suit with scruffy brown shoes and turquoise socks, explained that he’s “much franker in my writing than I am in life,” to a packed audience in the Helzberg Auditorium at the Central Library on Monday night. The lecture was part of the Library’s Writers at Work series organized by novelist Whitney Terrell and co-sponsored by Chris Davis and the English Department of UMKC.

Although White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena, was a less-than-modest success, he found his first great fame as the co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. Sex continues to sell for White: The prolific author published City Boy last year, which “weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories.”

White blushed slightly when a member of the audience — me, actually — reminded him that he wasn’t all that kind to Kansas City gays back in 1980 when his book States of Desire: Travels in Gay America was published.

“I wish you hadn’t brought that up,” he chuckled.