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

Author Michael Bronski has written a great and understandable book on the homophobia that heterosexual society feels toward homosexuals. In short, all because gays experience sexual freedom and often live their sexuality freely without fear of repercussions which straight society feels would be the downfall of civilization as know it, especially if everyone adopted this paradigm of thought. This is a myth that gets explicated fully here by Bronski drawing on several examples from history and research. Bronski makes his most insightful points on the "gaze" of the male body, the continued struggles for gays due to the AIDS crisis and the difference between public and private space relating to the "gay ghetto" in straight society. Also Bronski makes a startling revelation that gay society is not assimilating to the straight ideal but that straight society is actually accepting, adopting and drawing from gay culture more. The thought that "the world is turning upside down" due to the experience of sexual pleasure is ridiculous and unfounded. As a scholar interested in media and gay studies I can't stress how important and meaningful I found this text to be. It justifiably has a place in every personal and academic library because within it this book speaks volumes of information.

The current search by physicicists for a "Theory Of Everything", a short formula that will explain the universe.... comes to mind when reading Michael Bronski's newest and best book.Bronski shows that several aspects of lesbians & gay mens' lives, usually treated as separate subjects (sexuality, psychology, social norms & biasas, discrimination & civil rights) actually make a lot more sense--- when considered together, as a unified whole.He shows that you can't understand why lesbians & gay men are where we are, today, in terms of human rights..... unless you look at more than a little history.

Many books divide the subject of lesbian & gay male or 'queer' liberation, into isolated parts. The legal part. The sexuality part. The cultural change part.Michael Bronski's new book shows that-- that's arbitrary, and doesn't respect the historical facts.You CAN'T understand why we are so late in gaining civil rights against housing & employment discrimination in most States, and federally.... if you isolate that question from the sexual and the cultural history areas.Bronski shows, step by step, that those "soft" (he doesn't use that term) areas of gay studies-- are the things you need to understand, to explain the "hard" areas (he doesn't use that term, either) of L/B/G human rights and legal struggles .... And, to some extent, vice versa.The newly popular wave of "conservative" or quasi-closety authors, who isolate the human rights issues and avoid the realities of who we are, by saying things like "We're exactly the same as heterosexuals" ... can never explain why our situation is what it is, or how homophobia and discrimination can be dealt with ... without the wholistic approach, that Michael Bronski has now carried further, than any other gay liberationist author.