Written at the hinge point between pre- and post-AIDS queer culture, States of Desire is part travelogue, part ethnography, part intimate memoir.

White moves through cities and scenes — New York, San Francisco, Fire Island, Europe — tracing how desire organises itself socially. The book is attentive to codes and rituals, but never clinical; White is always present as both observer and participant.

It is cool without being detached, candid without exhibitionism, and politically alert without collapsing into polemic. White treats queer life not as a subculture to be explained to outsiders, but as a lived system of longing, pleasure, fear, and self-invention.

Read now, it documents a world on the brink of disappearance while also offering a blueprint for thinking about desire as something historical, spatial, and fragile.