Reviews for States of desire

The average rating for States of desire based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-03 00:00:00 Anthony Christopher I finished a book!! This was published in 1980 so reflects the lives of small groups of urban gay men in the late 1970s . . . just before it all goes to hell. Of course we don’t know that in 1980. In the epilogue White apologizes for his affinity for affluent white gays, and the need to focus only on urban areas. Even so, the approach is highly selective. Every city has drag groups or royal courts, and drinking groups and hiking groups. There was much generalization going on here — this city is this way, while that city is more like THAT. HIV/AIDS changed so much, so fast, but I have to wonder how these communities would have developed differently in the absence of an epidemic. Of course one could also speculate endlessly about the year 2020 in the same way. This book is very dated in many ways, but then it becomes interesting as a historical document— of mindsets at a certain time in the United States. For one thing, no one wanted to get married!

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-24 00:00:00 Don Williams One often hears about the constant sex of the 70s (See the documentary "Gay Sex in the 70s", for one). What gay life was like during that period in other places in the US is harder to come by. Luckily this book tells it all. Beautiful travel recollections by Edmund White that each tell a quick story on the city at the time. Edmund adds his own observations and stops just short from making grand generalizations. It surely captures what is left of that odd decade between Stonewall and the start of the HIV crisis, along with the fiction of Faggots and Dancer from the Dance. Also, I was amused by White's characterization of Camp on page 256. He says ".. Because camp is so arbitrary, it frightens the uninitiated or at least makes them uneasy. I would claim that the function of camp is to promote such uneasiness; it is a muted, irresponsible form of antagonism, one too silly to be held accountable, a safe way of subverting the system." I, a European from the other side of the Iron Curtain still struggle with recognizing camp in American culture, and this quote captures it beautifully.