Strikingly, White refused the ‘temptation’ of a simple affirmation of literature as a vessel for shaping an individual identity; rather, he argued, gay fiction was most useful at ‘adumbrating the arbitrariness of social conventions … challenging the “naturalness” of gender roles’. This is a genuinely radical analysis: radical in the sense of getting to the root, in this case the ever-shifting bodies and economies of sexuality. Words shape the mess we’re given into worlds we can survive. Edmund White will be remembered as a model for how to write dissident life.