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.
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