Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to middle-class Texan parents, he struggled for years in therapy before accepting his homosexuality. Edmund went to the exclusive Cranbrook Academy, then studied Chinese at the University of Michigan. By the early 1980s he had become a gay activist, part of a group of writers who called themselves "The Violet Quill", and subsequently, one of the founders of the Gay Men's Health Center.

From 1983 to 1990 he lived in France and now currently lives in New York, and teaches writing at Princeton University. White has defined himself not as a writer who happens to be gay, but as a gay writer, and has come to be regarded as an unofficial spokesman for the American gay community.

Whilst in Paris he met Hubert Sorin, an architect then married, but soon to move in with Ehite on a permanent basis. Their relationship was widely covered by the media, especialli once Sorin had been diagnosed as sufering from full-blown AIDS. In 1985 White was diagnosed HIV-positive. In 1994 White and Sorin went on a final trip to Morocco, where Sorin died at a hospital in Marrakesh.

In 1995 White embarked on a new relationship with the writer Michael Carroll, 25 years his younger, with whom he moved to New York in 1999.