Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility

In retrospect it is interesting reading Michael Bronski's first book which appeared in 1984. Near the end of the book Bronski writes: "Our culture makes strong distinctions between politics and culture: how we live our lives vs. what we enjoy. This has occurred partly because we have allowed sexuality to be compartmentalized and privatized. We have denied the fact that our most fundamental experience of pleasure is essentially sexual in nature. The pleasure of a concert, a paining, a play, a movie, all relate in some way to our sexuality. Things we feel, see hear, and touch enter our consciousness through the physical senses but they become part of our lives and being what they mean to us. Our experience of the material world in all of its forms and manifestations is profoundly sensual." (p.213) Author Bronski looks at gay culture and the impact that the culture has had not only on the gay community but the world as well. Bronski traces gay sensibility and the on going quest for "beauty" that we all psesess. Bronski traces gay sensibility through the literary works of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and John Addingotn (and of course Oscar Wilde later in the book). Bronski doesn't stop there as he looks at Gay sensibility in Hollywood often nodding toward leading and past artists of the [then] time. Including representations of gay life in Theatre, (". . . public acceptance is not going to appear at the second curtain" p. 132. Please remember this was written long, long before Tony Kushner's drama "Angels in America" in the early nineties.) Going even further Bronski looks at books aimed at a gay audience; gay pornography and a very early but dead on target report on gay advertising the then "untapped group" by reading last chapter on the pleasure class it is a perfect springboard to his 1998 book called "The Pleasure Principle." If you write or are interested in gay issues/scholarship you are doing yourself a huge disservice by not picking up and reading this and Bronski's other work.