1983 Edmund White STATES OF DESIRE: TRAVELS IN GAY AMERICA PLUME: NY, 1991, 1980, 1983,  1970, 344 PP.


[p. xiii] Introduction [1983]

     Just four years have gone by since I finished this book, but an indication of how fast gay life changes in America is that these pages have already resolved themselves into a picture of another era--the seventies. 

     [p. xiii] 1970s from a 1983 perspective

     [p. xiii] The beaming, bearded self-confidence of the gay men I wrote about, their insularity and hedonism and materialism already seems quaint. Given our taste for instant nostalgia, do we remember Ford?, Vitamins? The Shah? A Chorus Line? Gay Liberation?  . . .

     p. xiv] The tragic peril of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), which first became a recognized problem in 1981 and which had stricken 1,300 Americans by the middle of 1983. A breakdown in the body's ability to fight off diseases, AIDS has affected homosexual  men more than any other segment of the population (some 72 percent  of all cases as of mid 1983. A large proportion of AIDS victims die from such opportunistic diseases as Karposi's sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. No one knows what causes AIDS but the prevailing theory  is that it can be transmitted through intimate sexual contact.

     . . . Whereas lesbians have united over feminist [p. xv] issues, economic, legal and sociological--gay men have had few ideological  banners everyone was willing to march under . . .

     Now, suddenly, sexual freedom is threatened not so much from without (by Christian fundamentalists or the cops or local politicians) as from within. A mysterious plague has taken the gaiety out of gay sex and turned gay New York and San Francisco into wards for the terminally ill. [p. xv] 

     [p. xvi] But if the Washington style of gay politics is prevailing, the so-called Boston style is still influencing gay theory. To be sure, some of the most influential voices have been accented--I'm referring to the Englishman, Jeffrey Weeks, the Australian Dennis Altman and Michel Foucault. But American writers and academics have [p. xvii] [have adapted] and in John Boswell the United States has found a magisterial gay historian. 

Walt Whitman Democratic Vistas

     "Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences; but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible wordly interest of America, threads of a manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown--not only giving some to individual character, and making  it unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics, I say democracy infers such  loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete. in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself. "


[p. 337] Afterword [1991]

     When I wrote this book in 1979, I did it on a shoestring. I was an underpaid assistant professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and I had to tuck into my teaching schedule all the traveling and writing of this book. I "did" Los Angeles and San Francisco during a single two-week trip . . . Pen poised in hand, I was a frantic amanuensis to my own impressions and the scraps of dialogue I provoked or overheard . . . just research . . . I was making good on that ancient alibi, I'd talk to gay guys, not just the ones that attracted me, and then dash home and sit up for an hour before my impressions faded. Of course  I spent a lot of time alone; there's not much gay life at ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning in Kansas City in February.

     [p. 338] The whole ordeal was exhilarating and exhausting. At thirty-nine I was afraid I was over the hill, but now that at fifty-one I'm definitely past it I see that my valetudinarianism was premature . . . 

     I mention these constraints because they shaped the book. I didn't have the time or the resources to study a city in depth, although frankly I'm sure more knowledge would only have blurred my impressions . . . a set of impressions, and cities, like individual people, are more sharply in focus after one encounter than after ten or twelve.

    What circumstances obliged me to do  was to wing it with as much style as I could muster.  In some ways America was rather foreign to me (which made it more distinct); I'd never owned a car, a house,  or a television, or visited a mall. We used to play a game about missed childhood experiences called Deprivations, and I always won. To be sure these deprivations were largely due to that fact that I'd gone off to boarding school  at age fourteen and lived after college in Manhattan. This very marginality led me to be as fascinated  by my own country as a European might be on his first visit to the States--with one difference. My parents and grandparents were Texans, I'd been raised in the Midwest and Texas . . . I was ethnically and socially American, even if, culturally, I wanted to be European, for  if American intellectuals and artists immerse themselves in European high culture they almost never give up their democratic values. We really do believe that even if people aren't equal they should be. And to a degree that stupefies European visitors, Americans quite routinely confess their whole lives to strangers on planes and [p. 339] exchange confidences about abortions, incest, alcoholism and bankruptcy more readily than Europeans give their names.

     An eagerness to help, as enthusiastic as it is short-lived, is another American trait, as is an almost mandatory pleasantness. An American would be constitutionally incapable of pronouncing  such a frequent  French observation as . . .

     I took advantage of the instant intimacy, the uniform kindliness, and the helpfulness of Americans in writing this book (ideals I myself subscribed to). The very phenomenon I was studying---the emergence of a gay subculture that was urban, confident and hedonistic--facilitated the researching of this book, since I depended heavily on gay friendship networks that extended from city to city. In the original epilogue I apologized for having concentrated on well-to-do city-dwelling whites (and many of the critics of this book repeated this complaint without attributing  it to me.) My worries were displaced . . . I was looking at the new clone culture of the 1970s, one that subscribed  to the doctrine of self-fulfillment in every domain (esthetic, materialistic, sexual, social) that  flourished in Los Angeles and New York, was just getting started in the Midwest, and had not even been heard of in the boonies.

     Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this world was that it was a culture, not just a cruising spot, that it was a fraternity, not just a diagnosis, a fellowship of shared ideas about how to live a life . . .

     This culture demanded, as all cultures do, conventions and conformity. The new clones . . . had made commodities out of their very bodies, which in any event they'd bought at  the gym . . . [p. 340]

     When I finished this book, clone culture seemed to be the wave of the future. Ten years of gay liberation had changed the status of homosexuals from sinners  or medical freaks to an ethnic minority; albeit a strange one. Like Jews, gays could "pass" or be assimilated if they hid their identity, but at a great personal cost. Like the deaf, gays belonged to a minority that didn't usually include their parents and that had evolved a private language their parents often could not understand. Like blacks, gays constituted a despised minority that had decided to redefine its status upwards ("Gay is good" was an early slogan based on "Black is beautiful.")

     In the late 1970's gay businesses--bars. baths, discos, resorts, boutiques--were flourishing, as were such gay communities as Fire Island Pines, Provincetown, the West Village, the Castro, West Hollywood, and Key West. American psychiatric and psychological associations had been persuaded to reclassify homosexuality as a normal variant (privately, psychiatrists continued for the most part to regard gays as neurotic and more profitably as curable.) Gay professional organizations were growing, everything from groups of gay petroleum engineers to gay academics. Gay militants had faced down a Christian fundamentalist enemy, Anita Bryant. Gay publishing of everything from newspapers to novels were taking off. Gay promiscuity . . . represented an enviable vanguard even to liberated heterosexuals, whom the pill and antibiotics had similarly freed from the consequences of unbridled coupling.

     The new gay culture, led precisely by the prosperous urban men I was studying, had entered a triumphal stage. Whereas such earlier gay esthetic sensibilities--dandyism or camp had proceeded through indirection  and puzzling, deliberately intimidating [p. 341] renderings of traditional values, the new esthetic, which I dubbed the Pleasure Machine, was frank, hedonistic, devoid of irony. It was lived out not in secret, twilight chambers tufted with purple velvet and containing a rotting jewel encrusted tortoise, but rather in airy lofts . . . The applied arts--ingenuous flower arrangements, fabulous displays of food, . . . were the more usual outlets of the new esthetic than were the high arts. The functions of high art--to console, to educate, to reflect, to reconcile--had been preempted by the clever appointments of a "designer life." A conflict raged between nature . . . and artifice . . . : the conflict wasn't resolved but rather lived out by day . . . and by night . . . 

     . . . If human achievement, as Freud speculated, is based on sublimation, then its a wonder we accomplished anything at all for never in history, perhaps, was there such a direct conduit between desire and satisfaction. 

     Pleasure, of course, has its discontents, and some of those I hinted at in this book. Without knowing much about gay history, I dimly sensed that all this self-centered pleasure seeking (otherwise known as the American Dream) was a betrayal of an earlier philosophy that had linked homosexual rights with feminism and socialism, as though any shift in sexual politics would necessarily entail a new look at gender and class oppression (unbeknownst to me, precisely this formulation had been worked out by the English writer, Edward Carpenter, in the late nineteenth  century.)  [p. 342] I was scarcely, then or now a Marxist, but at the time "socialism" was the only word I had to oppose to mindless greed. I was dismayed that clones, having upgraded their homosexuality, were now content to cash  in on their privileges as middle-class white men. I preferred the mystic, democratic humanism of Walt Whitman. 

     I also sensed that we had turned sex into a religion instead of an art, a competition rather than a refined delight. If we were Americans in full pursuit of happiness we were also the heirs to the Puritans, which made our pleasure esthetic into something suspiciously close to the old work ethic with its guarantees of salvation through sweat and of transcendence through effort. This effort, this competitiveness, this nearly abstract search for perfection may explain the melancholy of our revels. 

     Now, of course, clone culture has become a sunk Atlantis. After having spent most of the eighties in Paris, I came back to the States in 1990 to discover that the world I'd described  had disappeared. Key West, once a gay mecca, now had the highest rate of AIDS in the country. Of the eight members of my gay writers group in New York five were dead. Every other name in my old address book had to be crossed out  . . . By 1991more than 100,000 Americans had died of AIDS.  The baths in New York and San Francisco were closed. Gay bashings were on the upswing. No one envied gays now: scorn and pity were the only active responses, though indifference was the more usual passive attitude. Gays are highly visible in the press and on television, but only for one thing--their disease. Gay culture had been reduced to a single issue. . . .

     The AIDS epidemic [approached] the Viet Nam War [as an all consuming issue.]  . . . We knew how to protest the war. In the rancorous [p. 343] debates over AIDS all the issues are fuzzy and the moral imperatives are all questions. 

     The disease has also thrown into relief several contradictions about America. For instance the U.S. has a splendid and enviable tradition of volunteerism. Gay health groups have not only successfully campaigned for research funds and initiated public education programs about the transmission of the disease, but provided human support [for the difficulties AIDS patients suffer].  Dennis Altman explains,"the reality that much of what private groups in the US do is necessary because in many cases governments fail to provide services taken for granted elsewhere . . . 

     Many of the friendship networks I described in this book became AIDS buddy systems in the eighties when the gay community, never more feared or despised, was also never stronger . . .  [Many different strategies  emerged to deal with the crises,] and the nearly daily coverage  in the media of AIDS news made homosexuality a familiar feature of the American landscape.

. . . [p. 344]  . . . If gays were becoming more visible than ever, they were also becoming less strange. . . . Assimilation had definitely had definitely won out over separatism, despite the tragedy of AIDS. Edmund White, Providence, 1991

(See 1991)






































































See 1983

 Kelyn Roberts 2017