The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom by Michael Bronski


The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom
Title : The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0312252870
ISBN-10 : 9780312252878
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 304
Publication : First published February 23, 2000
Awards : Lambda Literary Award Gay Studies (1998), The Publishing Triangle Award The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction (1999)

Drawing on a half-century of gay history, Michael Bronski brilliantly maps out the fascinating and often ironic interplay between culture and politics. In doing so, he illustrates how and why most heterosexuals need and love certain aspects of gay culture, even though this culture also causes them enormous anxiety and fear. The Pleasure Principle offers a profound and disturbing analysis of the roots—and the damaging results—of Western culture's inability to deal with both pleasure and sexuality, especially as they are embodied for many by contemporary gay culture.

The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom Reviews

  • Mason

    Book on Homophobia

  • Jennifer

    It's really strange to read this book, published in 2000, and look at the ways the world changed dramatically in a short period of time--and the ways it remains unchanged. The author is certain that progress on gay rights is fundamentally, inherently impossible in modern Western society, and while that progress does happen, and much faster than he expected, the tension between pleasure and denial of pleasure remains intact, just shifted slightly.

  • Queer

    Not the most relevant piece for today as it was a bit a product of its time. I still enjoyed the discussion of the ghetto as an erogenous zone of the city. I also appreciated the interrogation of beat aesthetics under the queer aegis. Unfortunately it took 150 pages for me to even feel like I was learning something new, but this is the nature of the genre. I also wonder in the case of this work: who was the intended audience? An educated gay readership would probably know all of this.

  • Brett Waytuck

    Despite some outdated references to the military and marriage, this book remains frighteningly relevant in the age of Donald "the killer clown" Trump