IN SEARCH OF GAY AMERICA Women and Men in a Time of Change <i> by Neil Miller (Harper & Row: $8.95)</i>

During the late ‘80s, Neil Miller traveled through the United States, seeking to discover how gay men and lesbians who live outside urban centers were coping with the AIDS crisis in an increasingly conservative political atmosphere. His travelogue resembles a follow-up to Edmund White’s 1983 “States of Desire: Travels in Gay America,” but Miller’s descriptions lack the conversational vivacity of White’s prose. His brief portraits of the people he met--the mayor of a tiny Missouri town or a lesbian couple in West Virginia--never really come to life, and the result is a blandly affirmative picture of a threatened minority.