States of Desire:
Travels in Gay America (1980)
In this city-by-city description
of the way homosexual men lived in the late seventies, Edmund
White gives us a picture of Gay America that will surprise
gay and straight readers alike. With great wit and humor,
the co-author of The Joy of Gay
Sex tells what goes on behind the glittering surface
of fashionable nightspots and glamorous resorts. But he
also shows us gay engineers, gay computer experts, and gay
cowboys; this is a look at a vast world never before documented.
By introducing us to a wide variety of gay people, White
gives us remarkable new insights into what it means to be
gay in America.
In States
of Desire, you will meet a gay timber baron from Portland
and a “big-wig” (literally as well as figuratively)
in the Florida drag world. Here are: handsome lifeguards
in Chicago—those “bronzed demigods . . . who lord it
above us on their white wood towers”; a Hollywood host who
has just spent “a typical L.A. day, driving 150 miles assembling
the twelve ingredients for supper”; a San Franciscan who
embraces his friends “with long, therapeutic hugs, silently
searching their faces for the weather report of their subtlest,
innermost feelings”; and Boston gay radicals, who defend
some of the most controversial positions that concern society
today. You will hear the stories of gay Cubans in Miami,
a gay lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and even a self-appointed
gay Mormon prophet in Salt Lake City—all narrated with
a novelist’s fine ear for nuance.
Into this vivid tapestry of people
and places the author weaves the pros and cons of such issues
as gay radicalism, the “urban gay renaissance” and the much
discussed gay penchant for hedonism and sexual extremism.
Above all, White shows the remarkable possibilities for
gay life today—from the black gay ghettos of Atlanta
to communes in New England; from “friendship networks” in
New York City to New Orleans-style “uptown marriages” (in
which men live with wife and children uptown and keep a
boy in the Quarter); from Kansas City, where the self-oppression
of 1950s gay life still reigns supreme, to Fire Island’s
unrivaled “spectacle of gay affluence and gay-male
beauty.” For this eye-opening book makes clear that gay
life is every bit as rich and varied as the many gay lives
the author so effectively describes.
