America's gay man of letters, Edmund White, inhabits a curious world of culture high and less so. He was recently called upon to judge a beefcake competition at a bar known as XL on West 16th Street in New York City's Chelsea district, his local neighbourhood populated by scene queens more disposed to pumping iron than discussing Hollinghurst or Isherwood.

White was required to choose between the physiques of what turned out to be three "skinny little kids" who "obviously desperately wanted the prize money, which was only $100", he recalls on the phone from his New York home on the eve of apperances at Readings in Melbourne and at the Sydney Writers' Festival. He laughs and admits the picture he's just painted sounds pathetic.

White has long seen the homo highs and lows. In 1983, his novel A Boy's Own Story, published in 1982, earned him an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature, and followed a landmark combination of essays and reportage in the 1970s surveying the social spectrum of US gay life, including his own. His biography of French novelist and one-time thief, prostitute and vagabond Jean Genet was awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in 1994.

But this bitterly cold Tuesday night in March revealed a disconnection between 66-year-old White, now a greying, full-figured Princeton University creative writing teacher, novelist and esteemed literary and cultural critic, and the lean, needy burlesque on stage.

"The people in the audience were all very hunky and any one of them could have got up there and won, but they didn't want to," says White. "I think you had to be desperate. I mean, these poor kids, two of them were lovers of each other, and they were 18 or 19, they were black kids, and they were, you could see, hungry. We live in a country of great social contrasts."

White grew up in the Midwest in the 1940s, despising his father, who published and told racist stories. At seven, White moved from Ohio with his mother and sister to the outskirts of Chicago, but still spent his summers with his father in Cincinnati. He made the break to New York City in the early '60s to work as a staff writer at Time-Life books, revelling in the bar life.

Four years after his short first novel, a comedy of manners called Forgetting Elena, was published in 1973, White co-wrote The Joy of Gay Sex, a guide to the "erotic, emotional and social fulfilment of a homosexual lifestyle", launching a career that novelist Alan Hollinghurst recently noted has been "dedicated to sexual truth-telling".

In the 1980s, White began a trilogy of novels about a gay man growing through 1950s oppression, '60s and '70s liberation and the '80s AIDS epidemic. The unnamed narrator in A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony was, of course, White.

In an age when the coming-out story is virtually a cliche, the impact of A Boy's Own Story could be easily forgotten.

The Washington Post described the book as a new classic of American literature, while The New York Times said White had crossed Salinger and Wilde to create an extraordinary work. White's 16 years spent shuttling between Paris and New York from 1983 also produced books such as The Flaneur, creating a general readership that follows his writing in Granta and The New Yorker.

He still calls himself a gay writer when most of his comparable colleagues eschew such labels as reductive, and complains the wider gay community has dumbed down and is buying fewer books. Gay men meanwhile are spending an increasing amount of leisure time in internet chat rooms – White included.

White's autobiographical essay collection, My Lives, released late last year, is his most sexually intense and unequivocally personal. Readers learn that White regularly pursues cyber quests as a slave seeking a master, with the full knowledge of his live-in partner, writer Michael Carroll, 40. While the younger partner usually screens the worst newspaper reviews of White's work from his famous lover, Carroll can't quite shield White from pain when the masochistic adventures unravel.

White says of Carroll: "He's right here, and we love each other, and, I don't know, (our relationship is) probably like an 18th-century marriage in France. You know, where you each have lovers and you go your own way sexually, but you esteem each other, you're totally devoted."

The relationship is platonic? "No, it's a complete relationship. Or do you mean the way Plato thought? Not casually, the way it's used to mean sexless? If you mean it's an ideal relationship, I think it's ideal. We've been together for 11 years."

Why did he not write about his life with Carroll in My Lives? "Well, partly because it's ongoing. Sometimes when you write about something, it's the kiss off. It's an effort to resolve something that is in the past.

"Writing has always been my recourse when I've tried to make sense of my experience or when it's been very painful. When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels. So I was really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to myself, I suppose."

Hollinghurst said the chapter My Master in My Lives was the most remarkable in White's career. White wrote about his relationship with a young American actor called T, who role-played the sadist to White's masochist, although they engaged in mental games rather than exchanging physical pain.

When T ended the sexual relationship, White wrote that the next two months were the "most lacerating of my life". White says his only regret about publishing My Lives is that he has now lost T's friendship.

White had written about holing himself up in his university office in tears over the end of the affair. Is he OK now? "My mental health is fine. I've completely bounced back. I'm quite a sociable, jolly, even-tempered person. But that break-up really shook me to my roots."

White, who also wrote about how his mother became desperate over men, now says his relationship with T was a "garish and exaggerated repeat of the emotions she went through"; a hidden theme shared by mother and son that may not be immediately evident in the book.

Yet he was simultaneously living happily with Carroll. Did an S&M relationship on the side somehow become more urgent than his long-standing partnership? “Yes, you’re right, you’ve put your finger on something I haven’t really thought of. If you already tend to idolise men, and you formalise it through S&M … given the circumstances, a break up really would feel like a total rejection.”

White wanted to read all the reviews of the book this time. It was "irresistible" to know how other people reviewed not only his writing, but also everything about him as a person: his values, his assertions, his humour. Peter Conrad wrote of My Lives in The Observer: "White has accumulated enough sexual partners, classified as lovers, hustlers, fuck buddies and rainy-day fucks, to fill the telephone directory of a moderate-sized city."

White acknowledges the good reviews, but bristles at the bad: "That does wound you. It's as though you were to overhear people at a party saying, 'Isn't he the most disgusting person you ever met?' That would make anyone's face burn. I would think that people who manage to be honest in such a hostile world we live in would be prized and praised. But no."

Perhaps, while White's imperatives in writing are beauty, honesty and art, the politics of positing literature about alternative sexualities alongside canonical works plays a part. White once observed the "exquisite" fairytale storytelling of Truman Capote "seldom rehearse(d) real feelings; the world is all too well banished".

In a wonderful early 1980s piece of combined reportage and critique republished in his 1994 essay collection The Burning Library, White argued that Capote, in keeping his personal feelings largely out of his writing for most of his career, had preserved literature's conservative status quo.

Says White now: "I suppose if you wanted to get to the bottom of what a writer does and why he does it, it's helpful to put together a bouquet of likes and dislikes.

"A certain kind of fey, fanciful writing I really don't like. I don't like science fiction, for instance. I don't like most genre writing, unless it's elevated through art, in the way that say a murder mystery is elevated by Dostoevsky to come out as Crime and Punishment. I've always been slightly snobbish about what I like."

White's two biggest influences are Christopher Isherwood - "because of his enormous sincerity and simplicity"; Isherwood's 1964 novel, A Single Man, is a "total masterpiece and really the beginning of modern gay literature" - and Vladimir Nabokov, because of "the beautiful writing and the way he was able to balance pyrotechnical style with intensity of feeling, because usually one of those cancels out the other".

And Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty, which took Man Booker honours last year and yielded new heights in mainstream critical and commercial rapture for gay subject matter? "I loved that book. He's highly polished in an era where nobody's requiring writers to be that good. He's better than he needs to be. As though he's writing for the gods, rather than for absent-minded and easy-to-please mortals."