In his 1988 semiautobiographical novel The Beautiful Room Is Empty, author Edmund White relates his experiences on the night of June 28, 1969, as he and others passed by the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar: “I suppose the police expected us to run away into the night, as we’d always done before, but we stood across the street on the sidewalk of the small triangular park. … Everyone booed the cops, just as though they were committing a shameful act. We kept exchanging peripheral glances, excited and afraid.”

The uprising that White witnessed is described by the Library of Congress as a “tipping point” for the gay liberation movement in the United States. One year later, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – the beginning of an annual June tradition of events commemorating Stonewall and the continuation of prior decades of activism and demonstrations for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people.

White, the author of over 30 books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of essays and articles, died on June 3, 2025. He’s called a “towering figure in American literature” who is “most justly known as one of the singular lights of gay letters” by Jonathan Alexander, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics who’s been named the next chair of the campus’s nationally ranked Department of English.

In this wide-ranging episode of The UC Irvine Podcast, Alexander reflects on both White and Pride. He also describes how he thinks about fear in the face of uncertainty, his vision for the future of the UC Irvine English department, and what he’s learning through his current research on how the craft of writing affects University of California graduates.

“Shadowing,” the music for this episode, was provided by Corbyn Kites, via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

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TRANSCRIPT

The UCI Podcast/Cara Capuano:
From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UC Irvine Podcast.

Our guest today is Jonathan Alexander, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics, and Director of the Humanities Core Program. He’s also affiliated with the UCI Connected Learning Lab, the Ph.D. program in Culture and Theory, and is a researcher for the Wayfinding Project, which is a multi-year study of writing development focused on college graduates. Soon he’ll also add Chair of the UC Irvine English Department to the long list of roles that he holds on our campus.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us amid your busy schedule, Professor Alexander.

Jonathan Alexander:

Oh, Cara, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Capuano:
I love your research interest and abstract as it’s stated on your faculty webpage: “My subject is writing – what it is, what it does, and how it moves the world. What, a little more specifically, are you working on right now?

Alexander:
Oh, thanks for asking. I love talking about writing – not only as a writer, but as somebody who has devoted a research career to studying writing. I find it one of the most interesting things that we as humans do, and I have been very privileged to be working for the last several years with a group called The Wayfinding Project, which you mentioned, thank you. The Wayfinding Project consists of me and a couple of other researchers – Carl Whithaus at the University of California, Davis, and Karen Lunsford at UC Santa Barbara – and we’ve been for, oh gosh, maybe eight years now, collecting survey and focus group data on college graduates from the University of California system. So, folks who’ve been out for about three to 10 years from their B.A. or B.S. degrees, and we’ve asked them to talk to us about their writing lives.

What is the role of writing in their professional lives? Do they write personally or creatively? Do they write for civic purposes? And it’s been absolutely fascinating to see what they tell us. We’ve published several articles and are working towards a book project on our increasingly large data set, of which we’re very happy, but it’s really incredible to see how folks continue to develop and adapt as writers long after they’ve graduated.

It’s definitely reminded us that writing development is a… it’s not just a collegiate activity. It’s not just a school activity. It is a lifespan activity. And especially as our graduates, as young people, move into more diverse fields, as new technologies come online, as different opportunities to write and shape the world through writing appear, so, too, does writing continue to develop for folks. And it’s been really wonderful to trace this out.

Capuano:
And I think I’m hearing that it was a way for you to maybe reflect back on how your own writing has developed along the way. Has participating as a leader in the Wayfinding Project taught you a little about you?

Alexander:
Oh, inevitably, all the time. And I think part of the reason that we launched the Wayfinding Project came out of a strong sense that we as writers – but also people who have been teaching writing for a long time – were convinced that some of the most interesting writing that our young people are engaging in is not necessarily taking place in our classrooms. (laughs)

Now, of course, as teachers, we would love to think that we are giving our students the most interesting writing assignments possible, and that we are prompting them to be creative and critical thinkers. But it’s also the case – and a lot of the times through the research that we have undertaken individually as researchers – we have seen how writing that occurs in extracurricular contexts or co-curricular contexts, writing that occurs because someone wants to develop a skillset, maybe how to create a newsletter for a campus group, how to learn how to write a press release – all sorts of things that aren’t really necessarily covered in college level writing courses – but are nonetheless, still interesting things to do with writing and, in some ways, vital and necessary things to do with writing.

We just were convinced that our students were learning a lot about writing outside of the classroom, and we figured that this was obviously going to continue to happen once they left our lovely campuses and moved into the work world, they would want to continue to develop their writing expertise. And then also, not just for professional capacities, but for personal capacities as well. That maybe has been the most interesting finding, is the extent to which pretty much everyone we’ve talked to has some kind of non-work related writing activity that they engage in, whether it’s just, you know, regularly texting friends, participating in social media, but then all the way to complex journaling, pet novel projects – just all sorts of stuff where it’s very clear that writing continues to play a really important role in people’s lives, not just for work, but for a variety of personal and even sometimes civic forms of engagement.

Capuano:
It’s fascinating and it shows that you all are making an impact out in the community, not only in the comfort of your college campuses. I’d like to circle back to your new leadership position with the English department. Incoming chairs always have an idea of things they’d like to improve. What’s on your list?

Alexander:
So, in addition to trying to not feel incredibly daunted by the prospect (laughs) of chairing our wonderful department of English, high on my list is just to continue the excellence in research and teaching that has made the UC Irvine English Department one of the nationally ranked programs in the country.

I am deeply indebted to past chairs for all of the work that they have done, and I’m excited to continue the legacy of building this incredible program. I think top of my list of what I want to bring to the program is to continue and further – for the lack of a better word – the defense of the humanities. I hate to say defense because that makes it sound like we have been put on the defensive, but in many ways, Cara, the humanities – what we do in the humanities – has been under attack for some time, in part through the withholding of funding, or the questioning of funding, at a variety of different levels. And that is truly unfortunate.

Our students deserve access to humanistic inquiry. They deserve to have access to classes in the humanities. And so, part of what I want to do with one of the largest majors within the school is to make sure that we in the English department are communicating effectively and powerfully about why what we do is so important, about why the study of reading, the study of literature, journalism, creative writing, why writing itself, are absolutely crucial to study. And I think that that’s a big challenge, but one I’m really looking forward to engaging in.

Capuano:
From your description of your vision, it sounds like they’ve chosen the right person to lead them into the future.

Now, the last time you visited our UC Irvine Podcast, you had just written your book titled Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir. During that conversation, which we had in June three years ago, we spoke briefly about Pride Month. The first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago on June 28, 1970, on the one year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. How would you describe to someone unfamiliar with the history why and how Pride Month came to be?

Alexander:
Pride Month is a very interesting phenomenon in our culture because it marks, how a group – a group of LGBT folks in New York in June of ‘69, as you as you noted – decided to push back, decided that they had had enough. Many bars in the New York area, like in many parts of the country – even here in California, even before 1969, bars in the L.A. area, for instance – were frequently raided if it was believed that they were serving or catering to queer or trans people.

Folks at the Stonewall in New York decided that during one of these raids, they had had enough, and they pushed back. And you characterized it as an uprising. Others have characterized it as a riot. There definitely was not just peaceful protest, but actual physical pushback. And this was kind of unusual – not unheard of.

There had been similar kinds of incidents in the preceding years. The Compton Cafeteria, for instance, in San Francisco just a few years earlier, had been the site of some real pushback, particularly in the trans community in the Bay Area. And these incidents, culminating maybe in Stonewall, marked a desire within the queer and trans communities of the time to not have to put up with intolerance, to not have to put up with ongoing harassment. And that that was a big national turning point. That particular uprising made national news and began to galvanize a sense across the country in many different queer and trans communities that it was time for a change.

To be fair, there had been – for some time before that – quite a bit of activism, resistance, even politicking throughout the fifties and into the sixties. There are several different groups that we know of historically that were engaged in activism and forms of resistance. But at the end of the sixties, the Stonewall uprising in particular seems to have represented something of a turning point in which the sheer visibility of it; the vocality – the voluble vocality of queer people at the time – just could not be ignored. And it became not only an incident that folks were going to subsequently mark and celebrate – as in the 1970 Pride event – but that they were going to continue to mark and celebrate as a real turning point in growing national visibility around LGBT activism.

Capuano:
Earlier this month, on June 3rd, the writing world lost a pioneering figure in LGBTQ+ and especially gay literature. We’re talking about the prolific American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and essayist, Edmund White. What went through your mind when you saw that sad news as you reflected on what White meant to literature?

Alexander:
White was, by any reckoning, a towering figure in American literature. The number of significant novels and other forms of writing – memoir writing in particular – that he contributed makes an indelible mark in the contemporary American letters. But he is, as you point out, most justly known as one of the singular lights of gay letters. And that’s probably the term that he would use in particular. But most of his writing was about the gay male experience, and he was a huge impact on any number of writers, any number of LGBT writers across the country, who saw in his writing an opportunity to think about how gay experience – but then also, by extension, lesbian, bi and trans experiences – can be written about in a high literary fashion.

He took the sort of basics of gay male existence in life and experience and elevated it through really beautifully wrought prose, through a real love for the literary. And I think that that was a huge contribution. It began to move LGBT literature out of a sort of genre or niche market into a much more mainstream, high literary market.

I remember as a kid – I must have been maybe 20 or so – buying one of his early novels called A Boy’s Own Story, which is loosely autobiographical. I think I still have my copy. In fact, the last time I taught lesbian and gay literature on campus, I believe I showed the students the copy that I had bought as a kid with the receipt from 1987 still in the book. And I asked them, “How many of you were actually living in 1987?” (laughs) This is just for me a marker of how significant finding that book was as a kid, as a young person, as a young man. Not only did I keep the book, I kept the receipt. (laughs)

White continued to write throughout his long life, producing many, many interesting novels well into his seventies. And as you point out, he turned a lot towards memoir. A lot of his books are very autobiographical in nature, but then he began writing memoir outright, as it were. And those books are wonderful literary documents about gay life in the seventies and eighties – in the immediate post-Stonewall era – but also taking us through the devastation of the AIDS epidemic and the aftermath of it. So, in sum, Edmund White: towering figure, both for American Letters and in particular for documenting gay male life and bringing those experiences into the literary world in a powerful way.

Capuano:
You already shared that Edmund White impacted you as a reader. Did he have an impact on your own journey as a writer?

Alexander:
Absolutely. I definitely spent a lot of time with Ed’s memoirs. They are absolutely startling and frank. He renders some of the intimate experiences of gay men in not only beautiful prose, but also with a real desire to get at: what does it mean to really engage people at an intimate level? What does it mean to form relationships? What does it mean to really be with other people? And, of course, these are relationships like any that are full of nuance and complexity. And he was such a master at being able to render that nuance and complexity. He definitely had an impact on me in raising the bar on how we write about our experiences as queer people.

I was fortunate enough, a few years ago, to visit with him in his apartment in New York. White was tremendously generous with his time. He would absolutely welcome people to visit. And at the time, I was working on a chapter for a book about his memoir writing. And it was wonderful to be able to visit with him and to talk about some of his experiences and why he turned to memoir himself, as a more direct and powerful way, not only to document gay experience, but to also stretch the power of what we understand memoir can do in really digging deeply into some of the complexities of our relationships with each other.

Capuano:
What a neat piece of your personal history that you actually had a chance to meet him and exchange ideas. That’s very cool. What has it been like to be a member of the LGBTQ+ community since the change in presidential administration this year?

Alexander:

I think a lot of us in the larger LGBT community have been thinking about what the change in the federal administration actually means for us. We immediately saw the continued and intensified attack on trans rights and on trans folks across the nation. And that’s deeply troubling, deeply saddening and angering. So much effort over the last many decades has gone into the development of not just rights for LGBT people but also trying to create understanding with all of the folks in the country. And I think that part of what is frustrating – and in that simultaneously saddening and angering manner –is seeing so much of that work so quickly and easily undone.

When you have rollbacks on rights for trans folks, that’s distressing. When you see an intensification of attacks on marriage equality, that’s distressing. But history shows us time and again, that a lot of progress is two steps forward, one step back. And so, I think those of us in the community who have been pushing for LGBT equality and rights are trying to keep in mind the “two steps forward, one step back” mantra, which is, we have made significant progress in the last several decades. And while these are setbacks, we are going to fight to make sure that there are only temporary setbacks.

Capuano:

I like the optimism and the hopefulness that your last comment kind of created in my own heart. Do you have any other words of wisdom, perhaps, for people who might be struggling with fear in the face of… it just feels like a seemingly constant uncertainty right now.

Alexander:
I don’t know if these are words of wisdom necessarily, but I will say that it’s totally okay to be afraid. Now, we don’t wish fear on anybody. Maybe the people who don’t want us to be here wish us to have fear, but feeling fear is not necessarily in itself a bad thing. It’s how we respond to that fear, how we react to it, that’s important.

I try to think about my fear and the fears that I’ve had in relation to what other oppressed or marginalized people are going through as well. I think it’s too simple for us to say, “I’m afraid and I’m just going to dwell on my own fear. I’m going to fight for what is right for me,” and to fail to recognize that an experience of fear is a powerful opportunity for us to develop empathy with others, to recognize other people are afraid as well – maybe not in the exact same way that we are, but they are afraid.

And using an experience of fear to really think about how all of us are here right now together, trying to figure out how to move forward, trying to figure out how to survive these years, trying to figure out what’s, what’s best for each other in the planet – that seems to me the most productive thing to do with fear, is to use it as an opportunity to think and to feel with each other in this particular moment. So, again, maybe not a word of wisdom, but at least something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in terms of my own life and the things that I worry about.

Capuano:
It proposes a positive strategy, and I appreciate that. Bringing it back full circle to your love of writing and everything that writing is, what would you tell a student today who aspires to make a living with words as you have?

Alexander:
It’s absolutely possible. It is not easy. (laughs)

I have been very fortunate to be able to mentor any number of students who have gone on to make their living as writers, either as journalists, or as copy editors, or as editors who work in the writing professions, who work in publishing. And I am so proud of them. To a person, they will tell you this is not an easy thing to do.

The Wayfinding Project, to circle way back, definitely shows us that there is the ongoing desire amongst many of our students to continue some kind of writing life, even if it’s not their profession. For those for whom it is their profession, there’s still a lot that has to be learned and still a lot that has to be developed after the degree is finished.

That’s true of any profession. It’s true of all of the work that we do. Finishing a bachelor’s degree does not necessarily immediately certify you to do all the things perfectly, immediately. It certifies that you are able to learn, that you have the capacity to continue to develop and grow. And we’ve given you some strategies and ways of thinking about how you can continue to learn. Students who graduate and take advantage of that as writers will flourish.

But writing is something, whether you do it professionally or as an advocation, is something that absolutely requires doggedness. Perseverance. I had a colleague once who talked about “making sure you get your butt in the seat.” (chuckles) And that’s, I think, good, good advice.

If you want to write – professionally or just for yourself – you’ve got to write. You’ve got to keep at it. And so, the news is good: you can succeed. But like anything, any profession, I think any career – Cara, I would imagine you would say the same thing – that getting a career started can feel daunting and overwhelming and challenging, but a bit of perseverance, a bit of doggedness is actually a really, really good strategy for seeing it through.

Capuano:
Absolutely. And what you said about getting your bachelor’s degree… I see the bachelor’s degree more as the foundation upon which you can now build your professional home. We’re literally just talking about the foundation, though.

Alexander:

That’s right.

Capuano:

And if you think about what a house looks like at the end of it, it’s a process.

Alexander:

That’s right.

Capuano:

To be sure. Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to bring up?

Alexander:
Oh, I’m sure there’s so many things we could continue to talk about because you ask such wonderful questions, but I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. And I’ll just make one final plug for the UC Irvine Department of English. Check out our courses. We have a wonderful concentration in literary journalism, in creative writing and in literary study. And I would love to see any students who are listening to this podcast come and check us out.

Capuano:

An excellent endorsement. Thank you so much for your time today, Professor Alexander.

Alexander:

Thank you.

Capuano:

I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation. For the latest UC Irvine news, please visit news.uci.edu. The UC Irvine Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.