Edmund White in 1986. Louis MONIER/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Utterly Shameless, an upcoming documentary, arrives with impeccable timing, landing in a moment when queer storytelling is no longer confined to the literary margins but driving mainstream culture across books, television and fan communities. Directed by journalist Brian Montopoli and former Out magazine editor Aaron Hicklin, the film offers a candid portrait of Edmund White, a sex-forward novelist and non-fiction writer whose work helped make that shift possible. Utterly Shameless sets out to give White his long-overdue flowers, positioning him alongside other contemporary literary greats. White, whose novels including 1982's A Boy's Own Story and 1988's The Beautiful Room Is Empty once felt radical simply for existing, is positioned as both architect of and witness to the queer experience. The filmmakers were the last to interview White before his death in June at age 85. The result is a writer in full command of his story at the end of his life, reflecting on a world he helped shape. Through archival footage, interviews and his own reflective narration, the film traces a life spent insisting that gay experience belonged not in code but in full daylight. Montopoli brings a reporter's rigor to the material while Hicklin adds the intimacy of a longtime chronicler of queer culture. Their collaboration also situates White's legacy in the present, linking his early battles for visibility to today's pop-culture boom. The runaway popularity of titles like Heated Rivalry and Pillion, which have turned same-sex romance into a crossover phenomenon among straight women as well as queer readers, becomes proof of a cultural landscape White helped clear. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the filmmakers to discuss White's radical repositioning of gay identity. Why a documentary on Edmund White? BRIAN MONTOPOLI We both bonded over Edmond's work in our lives. And we learned that nobody had done a film on him before, which we thought was kind of shocking. We did three long interviews with him, and then he passed away maybe two or three weeks after our last interview with him in June, which took us by surprise. He was 85. AARON HICKLIN In telling Edmond's story, we're telling all of our stories as gay people. He was the embodiment of the modern gay rights movement. He had this repressed childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. He was literally at Stonewall, and then he's in the thrill of gay liberation in the 1970s. He's writing books about it, he's documenting it, he's living it. MONTOPOLI He has sex with thousands of people and feels like he hasn't had sex with enough people. And then he contracts AIDS in the 1980s but has this miracle of it being this slow-progressor [virus]. Then he watches all of his friends die. Why do you think he isn't as well known as other great American writers of his generation? HICKLIN Queer history is always being revised or sanitized in some way. And Edmund really did the opposite his entire career, and he did it with a lot of humor and also a lot of eroticism. I think that was really radical. If he was straight, he'd probably be getting more attention from the literary community than he has. He really is, I think, one of the great American literary stylists. He's admired by Joyce Carol Oates and John Irving. The first time you pick up one of his books, whether it's Boy's Own Story or The Beautiful Room is Empty, you see gay people as full and complicated individuals. For a lot of history, gays were one-dimensional. Edmond wrote them as human. MONTOPOLI We feel very lucky. We have his literal last interviews. We're working with his family. We have [The Line of Beauty author] Alan Hollinghurst and we have John Waters in this film. We have all these amazing people because he deserves this. Despite all of White's contributions, he was also somewhat controversial in his views, even in gay circles. MONTOPOLI There's this stuff with Larry Kramer in the '80s where Larry Kramer was a real advocate for monogamy and for gay people stopping having sex, even before AIDS. And Edmund and Larry were kind of on two poles of this argument. Edmund talked about sexual freedom as freedom itself. Then AIDS comes along, and suddenly Larry Kramer feels vindicated in his argument that gays should live lives much more like straight people. They should be monogamous, they should not be promiscuous. So we want to interrogate that. And Edmond, I think made some good points against Larry, but I think Larry also had a point when people were dying of AIDS, is it responsible to be putting out work in which the characters are being portrayed in this very sexual way? So that's part of the film is exploring the tension there, and I think it's a