thinking we were a minority". White declined admission to Harvard University's Chinese doctoral program in favor of following a lover to New York. There he freelanced for Newsweek and spent seven years working as a staffer at Time-Life Books. After briefly relocating to Rome, San Francisco, and then returning to New York, he was briefly employed as an editor for the Saturday Review when the magazine was based in San Francisco in the early 1970s; after the magazine folded in 1973, White returned to New York to edit Horizon (a quarterly cultural journal) and freelance as a writer and editor for entities, including Time-Life and The New Republic. Personal life White identifies as gay and is also an atheist, though he was reared as a Christian Scientist. He discovered he was HIV-positive in 1985. However, he is a "non-progressor", one of the small percentage of cases that have not led to AIDS. He is in a long-term open relationship with the American writer Michael Carroll, living with him from 1995 onward. In June 2012, Carroll reported that White was making a "remarkable" recovery after suffering two strokes in previous months. He has also had a heart attack. Influences In his 2005 memoir My Lives, White cites Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and André Gide as influences, writing: "they convinced me that homosexuality was crucial to the development of the modern novel because it led to a resurrection of love, a profound scepticism about the naturalness of gender roles and a revival of the classical tradition of same-sex love that dominated Western poetry and prose until the birth of Christ". His favorite living writers in the early 1970s were Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher Isherwood. Literary career White wrote books and plays while a youth, including one unpublished novel titled Mrs Morrigan. Much of White's work draws on his experience of being gay. His debut novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), set on an island, can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner. The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov called it "a marvelous book". Written with his psychotherapist Charles Silverstein, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) made him known to a wider readership. It is celebrated for its sex-positive tone. His next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) was explicitly gay-themed and drew on his own life. From 1980 to 1981, White was a member of a gay writers' group,