EDMUND WHITE is an American novelist and essayist who deals with universal themes: love, sex, death, memory, manners and money. He is also, defiantly, a gay writer with a political agenda - the defence and celebration of homosexuality. WHITE achieved wide recognition as a novelist in 1982, with the publication of his autobiographical work A Boy's Own Story, an account of his torment as a lust stricken teenager in the homophobic '50s. But many critics regard his latest novel, The Married Man, as his best yet. It is a harrowing, fictionalised account of EDMUND WHITE'S relationship with a younger man dying of AIDS. The novel ends in the dust and heat of the Moroccan desert but begins in Paris, where WHITE lived throughout the '80s and '90s. This South Bank Show takes a wander with EDMUND WHITE through the haunted city of his imagination.