Ed White bares all.

Edmund White pities his heterosexual peers. "I look at straight male friends of mine who've recently written memoirs and realize that they can't afford to be as honest as I can," says the award-winning author. "If they talk about their promiscuity or their obsessive sexual desires, they have to consider society's reaction, not te mention their wive'." As a gay man, White believes he has no such concerns. "You know that expression, freedom means having nothing left to lose. Well, I can say anything I want. I can say I've been fucked over 3,000 times. I can say I have HIV. I can say I've hired hustlers." And he does. His memoir, My Lives, is nothing if not candid. Divided into 10 distinct essays, from the poignant and powerful "My Mother" and "My Father" to the disturbing and controversial "My Hustlers" and "My Master," the book is likely to affect, offend, and entertain many who read it.

After finishing My Lives, I e-mailed you, upset by the self-loathing, how you depicted yourself as unattractive, undesirable, and drawn to sexual humiliation. You wrote back saying you didn't think in those psychoanalytic terms.

Well, I could say the opposite the next day. In general, I think it's the writers job to describe phenomena that happened without too many theories about it. And psychoanalysis is basically a theory that depends on suppositions I'm not willing to make, such as that memories never get erased, that there is such a thing as an unconscious, that childhood is more important than adulthood in determining your character, and that sexuality not only expresses your conflicts but is the source of your personality, I'm not sure I believe any of those things.

Do you see how some might view your memoir as a chronicle of self-loathing?

I think that reveals a totalizing tendency. I don't think people are that unified, They are capable of being many different things. As for my book, I think that there is a lot more humor and good spirits than you're picking up, I have written 20 books. I teach at Princeton. I'm HIV-positive but healthy, I've lived II years with a lover. If you pay attention to the tone of the book, you see it's more Olympian and kind of funny, at both my own expense and other people's. You don't get to be that wise and funny unless things went pretty well for you.

I must say that I didn't pick up any humor or self-knowledge in "My Master," in which you recount your obsessive S/M relationship with a man just over half your age whom you call T. You didn't seem to have the distance for that.

Well, a while back I did this tour in Germany and there was this young boy sitting in the audience who burst into a rage saying all my stuff is about things that happened 20, 30 years ago. Why don't you write about your current angst? And I thought, God, he's got a point. All this recollection in tranquility is such a bore, why not give a battle report from the front lines of my life. So I did, with "My Master."

You write about your insecurity and doubts as a writer. How did you become such a prolific, respected author?

Well, I'm very ambitious. And I care about my career, Nothing else much mattered.

Except you were derailed by T and other sexual obsessions along the way.

But not all the time. You could even say the function of love is to destroy your life so that you can remake it on some different level.

Obsessive, passionate love, that is.

Which is the only thing that I call love.

You seem to think that sexuality should be compartmentalized.

Look at the 18th century. The upper middle class married for dynastic reasons and then had affairs on the outside, one after the other. That's what I'm happiest with. Neither total promiscuity nor total fidelity. But one person who is fairly sexless but stable in my life and lots of lovers that last a year or so.

Do you have lovers now?

Yeah. Two.

Yet you've had a partner for 11 years?

There's Racine's idea of love, and then there's Corneille's. Racinian love is obsessive, passionate, destructive love--and that's probably the real one--and there's Corneillian love, which is esteem love and close to friendship.

There must be some middle ground.

Why not say the opposite, that they should be kept separate. That companionate marriage, which was invented only in the 19th century, doesn't work. It's a bad model. Half end in divorce, And the rest end in sterility and sexual crib death.