White is the co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex, perhaps the drolest example of that most persistent genre, the how-to-feel-good-about-being-dirty Baedeker, and States of Desire is a kind of Joy of Gay Society—middle-class society, to be precise. In its demure way, this is as didactic a treatise on homosexual experience as has ever been written. You will not read about rejection in this book—certainly not rejection by the author, who reserves contempt … for those souls who have allowed religion or personal trauma to interfere with sexual expressiveness.

There is only one state of desire in this book: hospitality. Everyone gets laid and the worst disaster is shallowness; no one ends up in the colostomy ward. Everyone is as "out" as anyone could hope to be, and the direction of oppression is always from the outside in. No one questions the potential for gratification in gay society, and the author offers an anthropologist's tacit consent to all its institutions, except perhaps bitchiness. There are demurrers in this book, a reluctance to endorse certain practices the author suspects are unhealthy per se—pederasty, s&m, the elevation of impulse into dogma. But the nature of his uncertainty may be social rather than essential. The desire to be omnisentient is a form of decorum Edmund White cannot quite forgo.

Nowhere in States of Desire is there any sense of how different gay life is for a working-class homosexual, for a lesbian, or for a black. Some attempt is made to represent minority experience within the gay community—some acknowledgement of racism is offered, and faute de mieux, an intriguing account of Amerindian attitudes in the Southwest. There is a brief tap on the knuckles somewhere between Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., for the role gay people play in gentrification, and the author offers the tried-and-true apology for inattentiveness to women's issues….

White's first novel, Forgetting Elena, comes much closer to an amused critique of gay culture than anything in this book. It is tautly executed sci-fi, set in a kingdom that could only be Fire Island, and radiant with the enigma of sexual discovery. But States of Desire is journalism, a form of public discourse, and therefore obligated to the ego, as a humanist like White must think fiction is obligated to the id. Could an overactive sense of social responsiblity have hampered his art, much as (we are told by some) an undue sensitivity produces the desire to experience pain as arousal?

One may argue with White's observations, but one must welcome them, so deftly do they slide past the sphincter of skepticism. This lubricated prose, tasteless, odorless, capable of heating up with friction, and easily soluble in the shower or douche, is the nicest thing about States of Desire. The author's persona, as open and appreciative as the ever-young men of San Francisco he describes, is a particularly attractive bonus to his intelligence. If the bookstore is the ultimate gay bar, States of Desire is a hot number for all it connotes without egregiousness. No screaming here, no leather, no luxe; just the serviceable allure of a man who knows how to make the object of his desire relax.

States of Desire is acute, if not conclusive, writing from the finest stylist working in candidly gay prose. The "ethnic" sensibility, as formative for White as Jewish values are for Philip Roth, distills but does not devour his individuality. The book can be read, much as Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, for its fidelity to history, to experience, to craft. (p. 41)