States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), inscribed

• Published: E. P. Dutton, New York, 1980
• Edition: First edition, first printing (full number line)
• Binding: Quarter cloth, unclipped dust jacket in Brodart
• Pages: 336 pp.
• Dimensions: 14 x 21.5 cm (5½ x 8½ in)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-525-22235-1
• Signature: Inscribed by White on the half-title.
• Condition: Fine in a fine dust jacket; one tiny fox spot to top edge.

At the end of the 1970s Edmund White travelled to some twenty American cities to report on how gay men lived in the decade after Stonewall: their bars and churches, their politics, couples and loners, the new neighbourhoods and the men who stayed in the closet. States of Desire, published by Dutton in 1980, is part travel writing, part sociology and part self-portrait.

It was published a year before the first medical reports of what would be called AIDS, and it is now read as a portrait of a vanished moment: confident, various, unaware of what was coming. It is also an early example of literary reportage applied to gay life, by the writer who would become its most visible chronicler.