The American author’s anthology of his many physical encounters is a spiritual quest as much as a sensual one

Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.

Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”.