Give it up for Edmund White's can-do attitude. "I have a small penis," he writes in The Loves of My Life, his unapologetic sex memoir, yet "I was stung from ten or eleven by sexual desire." A gay man born in 1940, he has reached an age where "writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them." His answer: "thousands of sex partners." This book is only 224 pages long, so a few of those gentlemen didn't make the cut. There's still a large cast here, starting with his "maniacal attachment" to fellow fifth-grader Nick, whom he would wrestle for hours, quickly discovering that it felt good "to rub our crotches against each other." That is, by far, among the book's tamer descriptions of intimacy.
More relationships follow, from the many times in his early teens when "I had sex with young dads in station wagons at the edge of Lake Michigan," to Rory, a half-Filipino "half a century younger than me." White (A Saint from Texas; City Boy) brackets these stories with sober firsthand accounts of gay history, triumph, and sadness, including the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the friends and lovers who died of AIDS. But the bulk of The Loves of My Life is devoted to vivid descriptions of White's prodigious sexual appetite. As always, White is witty company, deploying a mostly "frivolous tone" yet displaying a gentler touch when writing about the struggle for equality. Readers looking for a spirited play-by-play of one author's satyriasis and a moving account of gay history will be captivated. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer