Though he seems to like the promiscuous America he portrays, he never makes it seem remotely attractive to an outsider. He does, however, make it seem a singularly unhealthy place. At a Fire Island party, for example, men mix Tuinals and Scotch, or Quaaludes and vodka, then use angel dust, cocaine and a drug called MDA to subdue anxieties and intensify their desire. From Boston to Portland, Mr. White describes night lives filled with similar concoctions. His America is an atomized country, with few children or parents, with little sense of the past or future.
Random sex is an exalted activity.
In that environment, a man must be forever young and attractive. So it is no wonder that the secret fear that seems to unite practically everyone Mr. White meets is not fear of anti-homosexual crusaders such as Anita Bryant or even assassins such as San Francisco's Dan White, who killed Mayor George Moscone and the city's leading homosexual politician, Harvey Milk. That's certainly a problem for Edmund White. Mr. White raises it once in a while, but he never dwells on it. Toward the end of the book, for example, he engages in a rather long meditation on sex between adults and children.