Thursday, June 20, 2024
6:00pm wine and cheese reception in the lobby
6:30pm – 7:30pm Talk in the Archives
Learn about the Cincinnati roots of renowned gay writer, Edmund White, through a personal talk from scholar Nick Radel, author of Understanding Edmund White.
Edmund White was born and spent much of his childhood in Cincinnati. Join scholar Nick Radel as he explores what it was about Cincinnati that spawned one of the country’s most original gay thinkers, a man who in many ways was and remains a sex radical. Learn about where White lived, where he went to school, where he picked up his first hustler, and how he began meeting other young men who shared his sexual interests – in a city that he described in his childhood remembrances as “dowdy.”
The author of more than thirty works of fiction, memoir, biography, and cultural history, Edmund White’s work includes the best-selling coming-out classic A Boy’s Own Story, the poignant AIDS novel The Farewell Symphony, and a provocative memoir describing his role in helping create the modern gay movement My Lives. His most recent work, The Loves of My Life: a Sex Memoir, will be published in early 2025.
Nick Radel grew up living the high life in Cincinnati’s Sedamsville neighborhood and, later, Delhi. Educated at Walnut Hills High School and the University of Cincinnati, he is now Professor of English at Furman University, the author of Understanding Edmund White (University of South Carolina Press, 2013), and is currently writing an authorized biography of White.