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.

Incestuous feelings existed in White's family; his mother was attracted to him. The novel The Married Man (2000) is gay-themed and draws on White's life. When I was 15 years old I wrote my first (unpubliEdmund Whited) novel about being gay at a time when there were no other gay novels.

Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13 1940) is an American novelist as well as a writer of memoirs and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love.