On writing, a pioneer writer, Pride and maintaining one's courage

In his 1988 semiautobiographical novel "The Beautiful Room Is Empty," author Edmund White relates his experiences on the night of June 28, 1969, as he and others passed by the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar: “I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. … Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid.” The uprising that White witnessed is described by the Library of Congress as a “tipping point” for the gay liberation movement in the United States. One year later, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the beginning of an annual June tradition of events commemorating Stonewall and the continuation of prior decades of activism and demonstrations for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people. White, the author of over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of essays and articles, died on June 3, 2025. He’s called a “towering figure in American literature” who is “most justly known as one of the singular lights of gay letters” by Jonathan Alexander, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics who’s been named the next chair of the campus’s nationally ranked Department of English. In this wide-ranging episode of The UC Irvine Podcast, Alexander reflects on both White and Pride. He also describes how he thinks about fear in the face of uncertainty, his vision for the future of the UC Irvine English department, and what he’s learning through his current research on how the craft of writing affects University of California graduates. “Shadowing,” the music for this episode, was provided by Corbyn Kites, via the audio library in YouTube Studio.