Remembering GMHC Co-founder Edmund White

by Larry Mass

[This Remembrance was requested by and is being adapted for GMHC’s website and social media.]

Edmund White, who was pioneering as a leading, openly gay writer, and who became a shining star of our literatures and heritage, passed away at 85 at his home in New York City on June 3, 2025. Though his flagging health left him increasingly housebound in the aftermath of a heart attack and strokes, he continued his blazingly prolific career as litterateur and gadfly right up to his last hours, having just published his 30th book and leaving new work destined for publication. His obituary in the New York Times highlights a career of literary achievement without parallel among post-Stonewall gay writers: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/books/edmund-white-dead.html

Although Ed almost immediately relocated to France in the early period of AIDS, his participation as a co-founder of GMHC was crucial to our success. As legend has it, Larry Kramer brought 6 of us together, including Edmund, with whom he was otherwise barely speaking (who wasn’t Larry on the outs with?) in the wake of Larry’s incendiary novel, Faggots, to organize and promote a new organization for research, information and services for the new epidemic CDC had just designated as “the most important new public health problem in the United States.”

The epidemic didn’t yet have a name. At that time, in the absence of certainty of cause, infectious or otherwise, I and other physicians were awkwardly calling it “KSOI” (Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections). I was determined that gays not be stigmatized by disease nomenclature, a common practice historically for scapegoating minorities, and was against the group’s otherwise unanimous decision to call our new organization “Gay Men’s Health Crisis.” Persuaded by their embrace of this term, however, I quickly joined the others in supporting it. Though I’ve had no regrets since— I think the name has served everyone well — I continue to be a stickler for scientific validity and accuracy. Because terms like “Gay Cancer” and “Kung Flu” are the kinds of nonscientific, defamatory epithets weaponized in the anti-science, anti-intellectual argot of police state dictators, such concerns were important then, as they remain today.

From the get-go of those first meetings in Larry Kramer’s living room, there was controversy. In the wake of Larry’s scathingly satirical Faggots (1978), which, however funny and moving, cast a harshly critical eye on gay life, especially on our “promiscuity” (a term that was so abused I often placed it in quotes), Edmund became an outspoken critic of Larry and a leading standard-bearer for affirmation of the gay liberation values that seemed so under assault by Larry. Among his books at that time were The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), which he co-authored with his friend and colleague, psychologist Charles Silverstein, who had been a significant figure in the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973–74. This was followed by Ed’s comparably epochal States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980). Both were widely praised.

The stage was thereby set for a dialectic about gay and sexual life and values that would continue for the rest of our lives, and doubtless beyond. At the outset of the first press reports on the epidemic (initially and mostly by me), Ed was leading a cluster of gay-affirming writers under the mantle of The Violet Quill. Initially, the most acclaimed of their works was Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran. Though Larry and Andrew were good friends, Dancer was pitted against Faggots as oppositional representations of gay life.

Though he declined further participation in GMHC or its successor ACT UP, Ed was key to our early organizing. Though I counted myself a close friend of Larry Kramer, I was also critical of him. This mirrored my roles more generally in the gay community at that time — as a physician and gay liberationist writer. I was always on both sides in my writing and statements, and not infrequently called out for conveying contradictory messages: yes, celebrate being gay and liberated, but at the same time ramp down on so much sex with so many and prioritize safety and responsibility.

Ed, it became increasingly clear, was a lot less ambivalent. Larry Kramer was a notoriously difficult and contentious figure and there was much Ed, speaking for many of us, felt needed to be said, then and subsequently, about Larry’s tactics and rhetoric. While a number of us kept trying to straddle the divide between these polarities, I think it’s fair to observe that Ed was never to reconcile with the figure he considered his ideological nemesis, Larry Kramer.

There’s one more element to this for now. It’s Ed who first proposed that Paul Popham be our (GMHC’s) first President. Agreement on this seemed unanimous. Handsome, virile Paul Popham, a former Green Beret, was well-known and well-liked in the gay community, especially in Fire Island Pines, where the first epidemic cases in gay men were traced and where Larry Kramer, with Paul’s help, took copies of my first feature article, “Cancer in the Gay Community” in the New York Native, to every house. That Paul’s likeability would be a lot more winning for a major community initiative than Larry’s scolding seemed sufficiently manifest that not even Larry registered strong objections, at least not then. Those would be reserved for his dramatization of the founding and progress of GMHC in his play, The Normal Heart.

In my forthcoming book, Wayfaring With Ned Rorem, I explore more personally and in greater detail the fallout between Edmund and Larry. Whatever water still flows under those bridges, GMHC is deeply indebted to co-founder Edmund White, who, more than any other figure and however ambivalently, gave GMHC and the greater AIDS activist movement the imprimatur of Gay Liberation.

We couldn’t have done it without you, Ed. May you now rest in peace as your legacy takes flight.

Lawrence D. Mass M.D. is a co-founder of GMHC, was the first to write about AIDS in the press, and is the author/editor of We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer

Hollywood, Florida, June 5, 2025