By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
I have watched nearly every forensic file episode ever produced because the series stresses the science of forensics and how critical this scientific field is in solving crime cases.
I am interested in forensics both because I have worked in the field of corrections, and also I taught the subject at the college level for several years. Forensics largely covers chemistry and biology, both of which were main fields of my education.
The cases selected to become an episode are not a cross-section of criminology, but rather a select sample.
This is why most deal with murder, often the murder of women by men, largely by strangers or their husbands.
In most cases, infidelity and sex are involved, either due to some sexual orientation, such as sadism, or a husband/wife has a new lover and does not want to pursue the divorce route which can be very costly, especially for males with children.
It is often obvious who the murderer is. A man has a girlfriend on the side, then takes out a half-million-dollar insurance policy on his wife, who is found dead a few months later.
A forensics investigation implicates the husband, and he ends up with a long prison sentence. The majority of homicides featured on the show would not have occurred if the couple were faithful to each other. This is obvious to most readers who adhere to one of the Abrahamic religions, which stress fidelity in marriage.
A New York Times obituary of Edmund White, III, a man driven by sex who claims he has had thousands of lovers.
The author, Fred A. Bernstein, in his 4 June 42025 article, lauded White’s long life and success as a multiple best-selling fiction and nonfiction author.
White’s writing glorified his promiscuous life with many, often well-known, men. His death was confirmed by his husband, Michael Carroll, who said White, a morbidly obese man, collapsed while weakened by “a vicious stomach bug,” adding that the cause of his death was unknown.
The article, titled “Edmund White, Pioneer of Gay Literature, Is Dead at 85” described his many honors which included “his vast and varied catalog of sexual experiences, in more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of articles and essays, becoming a grandee of New York literary life for more than half a century.” Although raised in the Church of Christ, he later identified as an atheist.
White was given countless major literary awards for his writing on his sexual escapades. He taught writing at several universities, including Brown and Princeton, where he was on the faculty from 1999 to 2018.
One of his highly acclaimed books chronicles his first 65 years, with chapter titles including “My Shrinks,” “My Hustlers,” and “My Blonds.”
His frequent companion was the young French architect, Hubert Sorin, whom White called “the love of my life.” He died of AIDS in 1994.
White was born in Cincinnati, the second child of school psychologist Delilah White and chemical engineer and “famous womanizer” Edmund Valentine White, II.
His mother was a school psychologist who, in Mr. White’s telling, practiced on her son, administering a series of Rorschach tests and diagnosing him as “borderline psychotic.”
When White was seven, his father left his mother for a younger woman. As an adolescent, a psychiatrist labeled White “unsalvageable.”
Although accepted to Harvard, his Detroit psychiatrist insisted that he continue psychiatric treatment with him.
So, he attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1962. White then moved to New York to work for Time-Life Books while writing his own books at night. In 1970, he worked as an editor for the Saturday Review.
He often found sex by cruising the streets, but told T Magazine in 2024, “to make myself stay in and write, I would hire hustlers.” He observed, “we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term.
When he saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, and an agenda” he began working to expand the movement. In 1995, he began a relationship with Michael Carroll, a writer 25 years his junior, but White had no intention of being monogamous.
In his 60s, after a sadomasochistic relationship with an actor half his age ended, he was diagnosed HIV positive but never developed AIDS.
One wonders how many people he infected; four of the seven male members of his gay writers group succumbed to the disease, as did his two closest friends, literary critic David Kalstone and Bill Whitehead (White’s editor at Dutton, his publishing group), and scores of other friends and lovers.
In 2000, White told The Guardian (a British daily newspaper) about his guilt in living to an old age while so many gay men he knew died young.
My thought after reading this article was, “Why was a man who lived a life filled with promiscuity and deception highly rewarded by academia and the major media?
Do we really want young people to look up to, and imitate, this man? Men who live virtuous lives and love their wives and kids should be upheld as examples, not men who live a life totally contrary to Judeo-Christian values.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. All 60 of Bergman’s books are on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other bookstores.
