First published in 1980, Edmund White’s States of Desire, (recently republished in an expanded edition), is a late-’70s travelogue in which the author candidly describes gay men and gay life in places throughout the US. The book was written at a time when the gay-liberation movement was gaining momentum—helped in no small part by White’s frank and revealing work—and the AIDS crisis was still a few years away. Consequently, States of Desire offers a portrait of gay life in an era of transformation and questioning, of new possibilities and a sense of hope. But old attitudes of homophobia, repression, and gay self-loathing certainly still existed, in some places more than others: The chapter excerpted here records the author’s visit to Kansas City, which he found to be like “the Fifties in deep freeze,” reminding White of the attitudes and ideas of gay men during his own adolescence.
Kansas City is hot and muggy in July. Trapped in an airless river valley, it fills up with steam until one can almost hear the frantic jiggling of the safety valve on top of the pressure cooker—the jiggling of one’s own nerves. If one bends over a page to write a letter, sweat stings the eyes, drips on the page, blurs the ink. On the street the buildings warp in the embrace of heat devils. The still, green foliage seems to grow, to bulge in front of your eyes: thick, murderous. Asphalt boils and stinks. Only the mad dogs and New Yorkers go out in the midday sun.
The steward on my flight in told me to look up a trick of his in Kansas City, but when I got there the trick wasn’t buying any. “No, I’m not interested in gays,” he told me over the phone when I asked if I could interview him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought you were gay.”
“I am, “ he conceded, “but I hate gay people. Gay bars are boring. I don’t care about gay lib. I just raise Arabians and show them at Class A shows and, if someone wants to buy one, occasionally I make a sale. Otherwise I just see my lover, who’s a test pilot for the government.”
In Kansas City I met more rejections and incomprehension than anywhere else on my travels. When I mentioned I was interested in gay life, in how gay men live, people assumed I was compiling a bar guide. Gay bars are gay life, they believe. In a bar or bed a man may be gay; otherwise he is straight—a person just like anyone else. The notion that affectional preference, sexual appetite, shared oppression might color all of one’s experience eluded them.
Sometimes gay friends my age or older ask me if I ever miss the good-bad old days before gay liberation. Surely, they suggest, it was more fun in the Fifties when you had to sneak around and you felt you belonged to a secret fraternity. By day you’d wear your Brooks Brothers sack suit and “pass”; by night you’d haunt bus stations and suck off sailors. With your “sisters” you argued about who was better, Callas or Tebaldi, while you drank martinis and played Mabel Mercer records and made pious lists of famous homosexuals in history (living famous homosexuals, of course, were subjects of contempt). Sex was furtive and dirty and exciting.
We all romanticize our youths, but a visit to Kansas City reminded me of what my adolescence had really been like. Kansas City is the Fifties in deep freeze. I recalled that, back then, everyone was always pursuing chicken. In Kansas City, the manager of one bar, a handsome guy of thirty, lives with someone who is now twenty-four. They met when the younger man was just nineteen. The “boy” worked for his lover as a bartender and responded sweetly, submissively to his every desire. If someone would ask Bobby to dinner he’d lower his eyes and murmur, “I’ll have to check with Fred.” Fred and Bobby, as I’ll call them, exchanged rings. Their scrapbook is full of parties and happy vacations.
But recently Fred broke up with Bobby on the grounds that Bobby has become too old. Bobby still loves Fred and cries himself to sleep every night. Oddly enough, Fred also remains attached to Bobby, despite Bobby’s advanced age. They still live together, though after they broke up they moved to a larger house, where they each have separate quarters and where they each bring home tricks. Fred makes out better than Bobby does. Bobby is in romantic hiatus, since he’s no longer young enough to be one of the adorable “kids” and is not yet old enough to have the money or confidence or inclination to pursue chicken on his own. For the moment he makes do with less attractive men who are beyond the fatal pale of thirty. Fred is dating, one after another, a string of teenyboppers.
Naturally there will always be older men who prefer younger ones and vice versa. But on the two coasts and in such sophisticated interior cities as Houston, Denver, Chicago and Minneapolis, the beau ideal is no longer the “beautiful boy” of eighteen but the “hot man” of thirty-five. Moreover, two hot men in their thirties or forties are now free to find each other attractive. In Kansas City such a union would seem weird, not to mention aesthetically displeasing. The compliant, slightly nelly boy and the dominant, quietly masculine man form the usual couples. The usual age difference between them and their different degrees of assertiveness approximate the dimorphism of the heterosexual husband and wife, a model that the gays also emulate through a lot of role-playing.
An important older businessman in Kansas City recently fell for a college student, whom he invited to move in. When the student, testing the strength of his own allure and the limits of his lover’s patience, made a few clumsy passes at his lover’s friends, he was quickly sealed off into heretic seclusion. The businessman has dropped his gay friends and pulled the student out of the bar life. No one is surprised or offended by this decision. “You can’t trust fairies, honey,” as someone pointed out. “Anyway, why should they be seeing other gays now? They already have each other.” Gay friends are companions while you stride the widow’s walk; once the ship comes in and hubby is home, no need to keep around these jealous, bitchy, treacherous queens. If you must have friends, why not see some straight folks, or your own relatives—that is, if they’ll tolerate you and if you dare to let them in on the dirty little secret of your sick sex life.
I may have overdrawn the picture a bit, but it roughly represents the attitudes I grew up among that still prevail in places untouched by gay liberation. In Kansas City gay life is seen primarily as a milieu in which one may bag a partner. Once one has paired off, one returns to the “real” world of heterosexuality. The self-hatred that underlies this attitude is poisonous. This is a game everyone loses. The beautiful boy can look forward only to outgrowing his looks and his attractiveness by virtue of his power and position in the world—a precarious perch. Since the man over thirty is regarded as having lost his youth, the essential ingredient of physical appeal, he sees no reason to exercise or dress carefully. As a result, only a small segment of the gay world is perceived as possessing any attraction, and as soon as age dims this lustre the beautiful boy of last year is brutally dropped and dismissed as a superannuated wreck of twenty-four. Worse, such a system, encouraging pliancy and effeminancy in the young, in no way prepares them for the bullying and forcefulness they will need when they grow older if they are to make conquests of their own. Traditional heterosexuality, at least, does not expect the same sex to play, serially, two quite opposite roles. Women are raised to be women, men to be men, whereas old-style queers are supposed to be first nelly and then butch. This extraordinary expectation is especially cruel to the shy, sexually passive lad who is prized for these very qualities when he is young and spurned for them when he is older.
In the heartland, such values have prevailed so long and changed so little that they seem immutable. This is the part of the country where the women’s movement amounts to no more than a snicker on TV or a bit of larking over inane questions of protocol: Ms., Miss, or Mrs.? The Beats, the hippies, the New Left, the war protesters, the sexual liberationists have come and gone without leaving a mark on Missouri. For Kansas City gays, whose beliefs and values are the same as those of the dominant culture, whatever ennui or alienation or despair they experience they attribute to a personal rather than a political failure. All questions that elsewhere might be considered economic or social are here reduced to issues of personality—one’s own or someone else’s.
Kansas City has half a million citizens, many of them wealthy from the manufacture of paper and the sale of wheat and other farm good. It is also a major railroad and transport nexus and a center for automobile assembly, though agriculture remains its economic mainstay. The city’s cultural conservatism can be attributed to its rural character and to its religious sects. It is a Methodist stronghold; the church is very businesslike and organized to resemble a corporation, as its members are proud to tell you. It is also the international headquarters of the Church of Nazarene, a fundamentalist sect to the right of Southern Baptists (many Nazarenes regard Anita Bryant as too liberal). One of their by-laws states plainly that a member cannot be homosexual.
Even the local chapter of the gay Metropolitan Community Church reflects the prevailing religious tone. The church, with its two hundred members, is the seventh largest MCC chapter in the country. Its services begin with “singspiration” in which the congregation works itself up into a frenzy of spiritual enthusiasm by bawling out hymns—much in the manner of the Pentecostal Church. Only after this fever pitch has been reached does the organ come in to introduce the serious part of worship. The MCC in Kansas City is resolutely nonpolitical; recently its members passed by only one vote a resolution to enter a float (Kleenex and chicken wire) into a gay parade. In the local Dignity (the gay Catholic organization), members do not use their last names.
Kansas City gay bars often refuse to post notices of gay-pride marches on the grounds that such demonstrations are too “controversial.” The bars shun all publicity; when a local paper did a story on them a few years ago, they feared violent attacks from rednecks. The eighteen members of the local gay Democratic Club, called LIFE (“Liberation Is for Everyone”), recognize that “flamboyant” (i.e. activist) methods would be ineffectual in Missouri. The club’s only tactic is to register gay voters by advancing the slogan, “The voting booth is the safest closet in the world.”
One of the most prestigious gay social clubs is called “SIS,” which stands for “Sisters in Sin”—which says it all. When Leonard Matlovich and the Reverend Troy Perry visited Kansas City 250 people attended a fundraising banquet in their honor. But SIS refused to participate; most of its members are married and some are extremely prominent in the community. In the eyes of the “Sisters,” a really good social event is a “pasture party,” a rip-roaring drunken orgy held on a blazing summer day in the middle of someone’s remote farm. When one guest went to a recent pasture party, he was shunned because he had a bad reputation for being a gay activist. He had to be reintroduced to people he had known for years, even old friends who had been to his house many times. All day the party kept drifting away from him.
There are very few gay entrepreneurs in the city (fewer than twenty) who have the courage or the inclination to hire gay employees. One lesbian who appeared on television on behalf of gay rights was unable to find a job afterward, despite the fact that she had a doctorate in sociology. She now lives in New York, where she has landed a good job but is no longer active in gay politics. At the New Earth Bookstore, a lesbian-feminist oasis, I spoke to a woman from California who has been in Kansas City for eight years. She longs to return to California but stays because she believes so much work remains to be done. “There’s a huge gulf between lesbians and lesbian-feminists in Kansas City,” she told me. “Though two hundred gay people protested Anita Bryant when she came here to address a conference of Southern Baptists, that was one of the two or three times a large number of lesbians or gay men has come out of the woodwork here. Most gay people, women and men, think that gay life and gay identity are synonymous with the bars, pure and simple.”
One morning a gay activist had breakfast with me. He was a man with a low voice, clear skin, straight hair; he looked as though he had lived a virtuous life and his and his manner was simple, honest. His body was of more-than-ample proportions and he conducted himself with innate dignity. When he was sixteen, living in a small town in Indiana, his stepmother discovered that he was part of a circle of older gay men that included several cops and the mayor himself. She created a tremendous fuss and Evan, as I’ll call him, was slated to be sent off to a state mental hospital. Somehow he escaped and ran away. “For a year I lived in a little town outside St. Louis under a fictitious name. Then I joined the Army. After I was discharged I enrolled in a bogus beauty school. When I graduated I didn’t even know how to give a haircut. So I worked a shit job for three more years to save up money to attend a proper beauty school for one year. Finally I received my license fro the State of Kansas; I earn my living now as a hairstylist. My being active in gay politics is risky, since the state could always jerk my license—there is a clause about immoral character that has been used to put several gay hairdressers out of business.”
I asked Evan how he had become that rara avis in Kansas City, a gay activist. “Well,” he said “six years ago I was arrested for ‘soliciting.’ In fact, I was in a bar and I said no to a drunk vice officer in disguise. The cops send out handsome decoys into the bars, but we all know not to speak to strangers. In one bar if the owner sees a regular talking to a stranger, the owner eavesdrops so he can later serve as a witness.” Despite Evan’s precautions, the officer arrested him when he came out of the bar. The case was tried in the municipal court, where thirty decisions are handed down every hour and where you are always guilty. The judge instructed Evan to see a psychiatrist; after four visits to a doctor chosen by Evan’s lawyer, his record was stamped “Cured.” Had he been convicted of sodomy as well as soliciting, he would have served six months in prison (until recently the sentence was two years to life).
“I got off lightly,’ Evan said, “but my lover didn’t. He had rheumatic fever. He also drank too much; he had never been able to accept homosexuality. When he heard I had been arrested, he went to bed and drank himself to death. He was just forty-one. His relatives descended and stripped our house bare. When I removed my own things, they accused me of stealing them. They still call me at work to harass me. I have no legal rights. Though we’d been together for years, we weren’t married. It was an illegal relationship. That’s when I became an activist.”
Evan’s chief goal is to end police harassment. A few years ago the cops beat one of his friends with pool cues during a bar raid. During the last Republican convention, Kansas City, Missouri, cops (much tougher than those on the Kansas City, Kansas, side) threatened to arrest homosexuals if any pro-gay leaflets were handed out. The Missouri police force regularly practices entrapment of gays. On the previous Memorial Day, Missouri cops set up a roadblock at the exit of a gay event; everyone was questioned and thirty-one people were arrested. When Evan talked to the police chief about such tactics and argued that the Constitution guarantees even homosexuals must be equally illegal. Q.E.D.: “Queen, eat dirt.”
In Kansas City the police stage raids on public restrooms and parks. The cops have installed a telescope on top of a hospital overlooking notorious Memorial Park; periodically they turn dogs loose on the bushes. One afternoon Evan was strolling through the park when a policeman stopped him. He said that a woman had accused Evan of “waving his penis” at her; the cop solemnly informed Evan that if he was ever seen in the park again the police would “ruin” him. When Evan asked to see the woman, he was refused.
One weekday afternoon I visited the baths next to a “Teen Mission,” a religious center for rescuing adolescents. The baths were dim and under repair and there were only about six or seven souls padding about. No pool, no sundeck, just a dangerous-looking hot tub and one forlorn barbell on a pressing bench. A young man in his early twenties fluttered past in his towel. He was wearing a silver choker on which bits of green glass had been threaded. His teeth were stained and broken; his expression was at once sweet and nervous, like Jane Wyman’s. he asked me, “Are you from up here in Kansas City?”
“No, New York.”
“I hear that’s chocolate city.”
“Chocolate…oh. Don’t you like black people?”
“I like to dance with black chicks, but these black men are so pushy. They think you’re just dying for it. When my lisp starts coming out, they get so excited. One of them says to me, ‘If you keep asking for it, you’re going to get it.’ Some of them are pretty nice, I have to admit.”
One had the feeling he’d take up with anyone who bothered to court him. He was ready to be in courted. When he saw I wasn’t going to, he nimbly decided that I would be if not a suitor then a sister. He sat beside me on the pressing bench in this room where the air conditioner was losing its battle against the day outside. The heat stole over me like a lover, trailing fingertips of sweat down my body. My friend smiled conspiratorially; there was a gala glint in his eye. He was up in Kansas City, where they’ve gone about as fer as they can go.
“I grew up in a town of 2,500 people, where I thought I was the only gay, but I ran into a high-school classmate in a gay bar in Columbia and he told me half of our graduating vlass of eighty is gay. Now they’re all married except me. My first old man was an officer in the Army. I answered an ad in a gay paper, but the soldier who had run it had decided in the meanwhile he was straight, so he gave my picture and phone number to his Army buddy. I went with that guy for a while, but he ditched me when I got too old.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-one. Now I live with my grandmother and I’m a nurse in the hospital. Lord, if all the gay people on the hospital staff got together and screamed you’d hear us clear over in St. Louis. Of course, I think all men are really gay.’
“All?”
“Maybe some are bisexual. My mother’s second husband was gay. Before she married him, she was warned by his ex-girlfriend, but Mother just thought that woman was jealous. I never slept with him, though he tried plenty hard.”
“Why not?”
“She’d like to have died if I’d tried; we’re very close. I’ve got a third cousin who’s gay. I met her at a party and after we’d talked a long time we figured out we’re kin. She works in a rest home—big, fat beer-drinking dyke.” After he imparted each unit of information he subsided into silence until a new happy thought sprung into his head.
“Right now,” he said, brightening, “I’m excited over this man at the ice cream drive-in back home. He’s very…what’s the word? Macho? Yeah, he’s that. He’s always eyeballing me. The other night he asked me to stick around til closing time. Then we went out in his car someplace and smoked some weed. He kept swearing and saying ‘Faggot this’ and ‘Faggot that.’ Finally I upped and said, ‘Look, leave my sisters be.’ He said, ‘Thank god’ and took off his pants. He may have looked…macho, but he was queer as a three and had me inside him in two seconds without Vaseline.” He subsided. Sighed. “There’s not much going on where I live. Did you hear the Klu Klux Klan has taken over Joplin? Now, they’re dangerous. It was a nice town but it’s gone red.”
“Red?”
“Redneck. There’s a bar here in Kansas City for reds called the Red Door.” He inched closer. “Did you ever go in drag?”
“Not really. When I was thirteen I wore makeup on the streets—I was a flame queen.”
He nodded. “I wear drag only at private parties, though once—this was the wildest moment of my life—I stood in the square in front of the courthouse in my hometown. I was wearing hot pants and hose. The pants were real cute: two rows of sequins above the cuffs and outlining the pockets and fine silver threads dangling down. No one was out; it was ten at night and everyone was in bed. If someone had rode by, honey, I’d of rushed to my car. But I stood there in the town square and I just screamed and screamed.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why. But I couldn’t stop screaming—that’s how gay I am.”
As we talked a man in his fifties, his powerful body covered with white hair, kept finding excuses to walk by. We were, after all, among very few people available for cruising. When my friend went off exploring, the older man engaged me in conversation. His earnestness almost embarrassed me, as though he had grown up in a world that demanded more complete honesty than mine did. He was a retired Army officer, and he possessed an admirable military directness. How else can I explain his ease in telling me so much so quickly? To be sure, he had a need to talk and must have welcomed someone willing to listen. He told me that he’d been in Kansas City for eight years, ever since his retirement; his wife was from Kansas and owned a house here. Until two months ago, he’d been drinking so heavily that his liver was now shot. Recently he started attending gay AA which as few as three, as many as twelve people go to.
“I think I drink because of my homosexuality. I attribute being gay to the fact that as a child I had a heart murmur, which made my mother overprotective. I’ve always been gay. I like to suck cock. I admire beautiful bodies.”
“You have one yourself,” I said.
“I’m working on it. I swim every day. But I’d like much bigger arms.”
He paused. “I don’t want to be gay,” the man said unemphatically, as though he had just turned the page and read the first sentence he found there. “I like straight life. I’m used to it. I like playing bridge with other couples too. But I’m afraid things may fall apart with my wife. She’s slim, she’s a good dancer, she knows how to draw people out, she’s an ideal companion. But sex with her….” He looked away. “For years she thought I was just undersexed. Now she knows I’m gay; I told her. We read The Homosexual Matrix out loud to each other. We went to a marriage counselor for two months (he was a real fool). My wife wants me not to jack off or go to the baths; she thinks that will make me so horny I’ll want sex with her. But it won’t. I wish she had a lover. What do you think I should do?”
“I have no idea,” I said, feeling that it would be presumptuous to offer advice to someone in a situation so foreign to my own experience. I did suggest they could move to a more liberal community where his wife might receive some support from understanding friends—but I wonder if such a place exists. I could have offered examples of other people’s arrangements, but each depended on the couple’s creativity, freedom from convention, emotional resources, money and so on. My favorite professor in college lived with his wife and children, his wife’s admirers, his own leather boys and assorted strays in a great house at the top of a hill—but this ménage was built on his wife’s wanting a complex, fascinating husband and on the husband’s tireless energy in inventing and sustaining new forms for love. It also depended on her considerable wealth.
What could this man do, however, he who truly loved his wife and felt uncomfortable among gays? Was he to abandon their bridge games for smoky discos? What saddened me the most was the thought that he and she might have been happy together if they had found a form to accommodate their dilemma, a way of naming and imagining their relationship. Our society, with its single word love and its single institution of marriage, is pitifully impoverished.
Excerpted from States of Desire Revisited, University of Wisconsin Press 2014. Used by permission of Edmund White. Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.