Edmund White

In 1981 Edmund White cofounded Gay Men’s Health Crisis with Larry Kramer to raise awareness about AIDS and offer services for HIV patients. Two years later White moved to Paris, where, after Michel Foucault’s death, he helped Foucault’s partner, Daniel Defert, organize the collective’s French counterpart, AIDES. After his own HIV diagnosis in 1985, White wrote about the subject in the novels The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man, citing “an urgency—but for my own sake, not for anybody else’s—to communicate with people about what it was like to be positive.”