Edmund White has written exquisite, evasive fiction (Forgetting Elena, Caracole) meticulously detailing the relations inside imagined societies; he has also co-written The Joy of Gay Sex. In him a talent for indirection and implication co-exists with an impulse towards explicit subject matter. This travel book – a journey by a homosexual author round the homosexual communities of America’s great cities – dramatizes both facets of White’s writing, and allies them to his view of homosexual life as a process of self-invention: ‘Once one discovers one is gay, one must choose everything, from how to walk, dress and talk to where to live, with whom and on what terms.’ A consequence of this view is that everything becomes a drama of taste, a comedy of manners. ‘No clothes, of course, are casual; they are so densely superscribed with messages it’s a wonder the ink doesn’t run when it rains.’ White’s manner is always sympathetic, but with a hint of distance which allows us to deduce the author’s amusement and relish: in New York,

The gay male couple inhabiting the Seventies is composed of two men who love each other, share the same friends and interests, and fuck each other almost inadvertently once every six months during a particularly stoned, impromptu three-way.

It’s a dandy’s style, a dandy’s manner which enjoys positioning its intelligence against a background which will display it to better advantage: ‘fist-fucking, as one French savant has pointed out, is our century’s only brand-new contribution to the sexual aramentarium.’

The surfaces, though, tend to remain as surfaces. White’s professed solidarity with all gays makes him keener to describe than to evaluate, and he is stronger on the forms of gay life than on the contents. But the forms are lively and various enough to keep us reading: the gay deaf baseball team, the Complete Jockstrap Book (the ‘Disc Jockey’ has headphones), the S-M, the gay priests, the cowboys, the clubs and baths and bars – ‘At the Black and Blue the customers are so butch they swill Perrier right out of the bottle (the bartenders j am the lime down into it)’. White talks to Bobbie and Helmut and Sean and Denton, to Hank and Eddie and Armardo and Bryce, to Claude – ‘I’ll call him Claude, for that name suggests his look of a World War II pilot’ – and Yves and Harv and Carter and Eduardo. So many ‘lifestyles’; so many lives. If White’s manner seems oddly passive when one thinks of how Tom Wolfe or Martin Amis or de Tocqueville would have treated similar material, that’s partly because White is reluctant to satirize gays, and partly because – you can sense this – the concealment of occasional unease gives his prose an additional shimmer. Think what could have been extracted from the fact that the Stonewall, the bar where gay liberation started with a riot in 1969, is ‘now a natural wood craft shop and bagel eatery.’ High comedy, rather than satire, is White’s preferred manner.

That helps to make this, six years after original publication, seem a strangely gentle, unanxious book, a kind of pastoral. AIDS has given States of Desire a different flavour, and not just because of the new afterword White has added: AIDS has changed the texture of the book, making it more nostalgic and distant, as if the problems it examines and the constrained lives it describes aren’t really serious, not by our new standards. There is very little old age or disease in States of Desire – we see that more clearly now. In an odd way, it’s an innocent book. See what AIDS has done to this remark: ‘There’s always an orgy room; they’d die without an orgy room.’