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The scorn directed against drags is especially virulent they have become the outcasts of gay life, the queers of homosexuality.In fact, they are classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.

Edmund White

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Edmund White
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 13
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Memoirist
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Cincinnati
Ohio
Edmund Valentine White III
Facts
Drag
Located
Transvestite
Become
Isolated
Macho
Scapegoats
Stills
Fears
Outcast
Transvestites
Still
Classic
Homosexuality
Masked
Life
Gay
Persecution
Outcasts
Especially
Scorn
Virulent
Though
Fascism
Drags
Fact
Directed
Scapegoat
Queers

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These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
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Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.
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I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be
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Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
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As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together
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I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.
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In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.
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Hell is God's Absence.
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In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.
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The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
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I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
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I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...
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