Edmund White - States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America

Praise for States of Desire.

With no holds barred, each center is classified. Always we hear the private voice of Edmund White, humanist yet unsentimental, tough but never cynical, luscious though not campy. The prose glimmers and surges into channels far wider than his stated theme.

Washington Post Book World

[Whites] novelistic giftscuriosity about character, an alert ear and eye for revelatory detailmake this book absorbing.

Newsweek

Fascinating and deeply disturbing This amusing and colorful tour uses the predicament of the homosexual minority to demonstrate what is very wrong with the social health of the country.

Christopher Isherwood

In Edmund White we may have found our gay De Tocqueville.

William Burroughs

Also by Edmund White

Forgetting Elena

The Joy of Gay Sex (with Charles Silverstein)

Nocturnes for the King of Naples

States of Desire

A Boys Own Story

Caracole

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (editor)

Genet: A Biography

The Selected Writings of Jean Genet (editor)

The Burning Library: Essays (edited by David Bergman)

Skinned Alive: Stories

Our Paris: Sketches from Memory

The Farewell Symphony: A Novel

Marcel Proust

The Married Man

The Flneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris

Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (editor)

Fanny: A Fiction

Arts and Letters

Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction (editor)

My Lives

Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel

Chaos: A Novella and Stories

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

City Boy: My Life in New York during the 1960s and 70s

Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel

Sacred Monsters

Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

STATES OF DESIRE REVISITED

Travels in Gay America

Edmund White

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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Copyright 1980, 1983, 1991, 2014 by Edmund White

All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any meansdigital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwiseor conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, Edmund, 1940, author.

States of desire revisited : travels in gay America / Edmund White.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-299-30264-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-299-30263-4 (e-book)

1. Gay menUnited States. I. Title.

HQ76.2.U5W45 2014

306.76620973dc23

2014007459

Four chapters of this book have appeared in different form in Christopher Street.

To Patrick Merla

Charles Ortleb, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Christopher Street, originally suggested the idea of this book to me and guided four chapters of the manuscript through publication in his magazine. I am grateful to him for his advice and encouragement as well as the inspiration to do the book.

Bill Whitehead, my editor at Dutton, has also lavished his intelligence and careful attention on this book; he has been of especial help in preparing the final manuscript.

Christopher Cox provided endless hours of moral support and critical acuity during the writing of this book. He has been over every word of the text several times. David Kalstone has also given me the benefit of his thoughtful reactions and friendship.

Old friends in New York and new friends in the cities I visited shared their lives with me and put me in touch with still other people. Their openness and generosity helped me all along the way. Without that help this book would never have been written.

I quickly learned how hospitable gays everywhere are to each other; the warmth and candor with which I was received bear witness to that kindness.

I also gratefully acknowledge Raphael Kadushin, the editor of the University of Wisconsin Press who asked me to update this book.

Since this book came out in 1980, the world of gays has evolved more quickly than any other in peacetime since the beginning of history. Violence and war have been able to effect sudden and usually disastrous changes, but the changes that occur peacefully are most often slow and sedimentary. In fact this book shows a past world preserved in amber, despite the way that world was full of plans, impregnated by what it imagined was a utopian future.

Back then most of the gays who were visible and vocal were leftists or at least lightly progressive. Middle-class gays knew better than to risk their position by coming out. Most of the gay liberation leaders had been active in other progressive causes, such as the civil rights movement or the anti-war movement. The early days of the gay movement were noisy with sit-ins, actions, manifestos, consciousness-raising sessions, communesall the institutions and practices inherited from everyone from the hippies to the Maoists. We had heard the rhetoric of feminism and the Black Panthersin fact at Stonewall gays called themselves the Pink Panthers and the new slogan Gay is Good was obviously an echo of Black is Beautiful.

One of the early groups, the Gay Activists Alliance, wasnt progressive enough for a handful of radicals, who founded the competing Gay Liberation Alliance. Like the old Civil Rights workers, they staged sit-ins, for instance now in the Suffolk County Police Station, since the police there were endlessly monitoring and arresting gays in Fire Island Pines. Just as the Stonewall Uprising had been triggered by the police raid on a popular Greenwich Village dance club, in the same way gay radicals were indignant that there were repeated police raids on the rich gay ghetto of the Pines.

But it wasnt the privileged white boys of the Pines who were rebelling. It was the blacks and Puerto Ricans who took the A train down from Harlem, kids who were already used to combating the pigsand the white radical students whod emerged from all the causes of the sixties. I can remember at Stonewall talking to some straight Yippies who saw in this gay protest the beginning of a new struggle against the establishment. They were more excited than we were, we who could scarcely believe we constituted a minority rather than a diagnosis.

And then along came AIDS. Whatever its older roots in Africa might or might not have been, AIDS first emerged into our consciousness in 1981. That was the year Larry Kramer first invited us to his glamorous lower Fifth Avenue apartment to hear Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien tell us about this strange new disease, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) as it was then called. Soon everyone was calling it gay cancer.

As you can tell, reading this book, which was published a year before the disease was ever mentioned, our concerns were for everything except our excesses. Dr. Friedman-Kien recommended that we give up sex altogether for the durationwhich we heard with solemnity though we thought it was a preposterous idea. Hadnt we already been a medical diagnosis before our much-vaunted liberation, scarcely more than a decade old? In the past gays had been so scarce on the ground it was hard to find a trick; every time a new gay bar opened the cops shut it down. Now the bars and backrooms and discos were flourishing; we equated sexual freedom with our minority rights. We werent about to give up sex. For many men my age and older, gay life was only about sexual availability. Talk of gay politics or gay culture or gay history usually was met with a smilecmon, its all about getting laid!