Utterly Shameless, a new documentary, is ultra-timely, landing in a moment when queer storytelling is no longer confined to literary margins but driving mainstream culture across books, TV, 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.

He is positioned as both architect of witness to the queer experience. The filmmakers were the last to interview White beforehis death in June at age 85.

The 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.

Why Documentary about Edmund White?

BRIAN MONTOPOLI We both bonded over Edmond’s work in our lives. 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 just 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 our stories as gay people. He was the embodiment of the modern gay rights movement. He had 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.

White note 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, with a lot of humor and a lot of eroticism. 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 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, 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. We have all these amazing people because he deserves this.

Despite White’s contributions, he was controversial in his views, even in gay circles.

MONTOPOLI There’s this stuff with Larry Kramer in the 1980s where he was 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.

Now with different preventative HIV drugs, sexual liberation, and recklessness, is back in full force.

MONTOPOLI There was a New York magazine article, [“We’ve Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness”], about everyone on Fire Island with their GHB and their doxycycline and all that. We’re sort of back into that ’70s-era approach to sex.

HICKLIN One of the interesting arcs of Ed’s life is he was co-author, pre-AIDS, of the The Joy of Gay Sex, which was an incredibly out-there, graphically illustrated book on how to have sex if you’re a gay man. It was incredibly useful for lots of people. And then he followed up with a travel log traveling around America, exploring how gay men in different towns live their lives.

He was pioneer of not just fiction, not just memoir but also journalism. He got away with it because he’s a great writer.

HICKLIN You couldn’t probably do this documentary the way we want to do it 5 or 10 years ago, even. It would been hard. This kind of frank exploration of sexuality wouldn’t have flown that long ago.

I think part of the circular argument here is that in some ways, Edmund White helped it happen by being fearless in his writing. That was part of cultural change that he was at the forefront of what you’re able to do now. What you’re able to see on screen now is light years ahead of what we were able to see not that very long ago.

The documentary couldn’t have existed 10 years ago.