Politics & Power Quote by Edmund White

There is a sly humility in the phrase "less defensive tone", a little curtain-raise that tells you Edmund White knows exactly how literary reputations get managed: by preempting the charge before it lands. He frames the admission as a tactical shift, not a capitulation. The real confession isn’t simply that he can’t write a book like States of Desire now; it’s that the conditions that made that kind of book feel possible - and legible - have changed.

"Jazzy" and "contemporary" are doing a lot of work. They’re not just stylistic adjectives, they’re a whole posture: quick, improvisational, nightlife-smart, moving through subcultures with the confidence of someone who can translate them for a broader audience without sounding like a tourist. In 1979, that tone could read as electrifying reportage, a dispatch from an America whose queer life was still largely off the official map, and therefore newly claimable as subject and style.

Today, White implies, the same move would risk different accusations: nostalgia, genial connoisseurship, even a kind of authorial entitlement. The America he once "looked at" has fractured into algorithmic micro-publics; the idea of a single "contemporary look" feels almost quaint. There’s also an unspoken historical gravity: post-1979 means AIDS, culture wars, marriage equality, backlash, and new vocabularies of identity. White is marking a limit not only of age, but of era - acknowledging that what once sounded like jazz might now sound like a cover band.