Edmund White, Our Greatest Gay Literary Icon, Celebrates His 80th Birthday in Grand Style

Author Edmund White celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday with his partner and husband Michael Carroll at the Italian Academy at Columbia University where White was a fellow. The party was thrown by writers Rick Whitaker, Jenny McPhee, Giuseppe Gullo, and  actor and theater professor Patrick Mulryan (Brooklyn College).

Above from left to right: Stage producer Brad Blume (The Inheritance), Broadway performer Andrew Wilson (Cats), and Edmund White.

Guests included a regular who’s who of New York’s literary intelligentsia, including: Tracy K. Smith and her husband Raf Allison, Salman Rushdie, Maaza Mengiste and Marco, John McManus and his husband Kareem Fahmy, Garrard Conley and husband Shahab Yunis, writer and filmmaker Xan Price, David Ebershoff, Gary Shteyngart, editor Ruth Greenstein of Turtle Point Press, Patrick Ryan, Gabe Hudson, Brian Alessandro, Zach Pace and Eric Dean Wilson (author of the upcoming non-fiction Freon), poet Angelo Nikolopoulos, Tim Teeman, Peter Godwin, Sheila Kohler, and 2019 National Book Award winner Susan Choi (Trust Exercise).

Above: Edmund White and some of his “editors” on his 75th birthday, photographed by Slava Mogutin, in his Chelsea, New York apartment, December 2015. Featured in Gay Letter number 4.

Author Brad Gooch gave a moving  and very funny tribute speech and playwright Mari Moriarty read from one of White’s classics Our Young Man.

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For more fabulous photos check out Michael Carrol’s Instagram.