BiblioVault - Books about Gay men

What Do Gay Men Want?

An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity

David M. Halperin

University of Michigan Press, 2010

“Compelling, timely, and provocative. The writing is sleek and exhilarating. It doesn’t waste time telling us what it will do or what it has just done—it just does it.”
—Don Kulick, Professor of Anthropology, New York University

How we can talk about sex and risk in the age of barebacking—or condomless sex—without invoking the usual bogus and punitive clichés about gay men’s alleged low self-esteem, lack of self-control, and other psychological “deficits”? Are there queer alternatives to psychology for thinking about the inner life of homosexuality? What Do Gay Men Want? explores some of the possibilities.

Unlike most writers on the topic of gay men and risky sex, David Halperin liberates gay male subjectivity from psychology, demonstrating the insidious ways in which psychology’s defining opposition between the normal and the pathological subjects homosexuality to medical reasoning and revives a whole set of unexamined moral assumptions about “good” sex and “bad” sex.

In particular, Halperin champions neglected traditions of queer thought, including both literary and popular discourses, by drawing on the work of well-known figures like Jean Genet and neglected ones like Marcel Jouhandeau. He shows how the long history of of gay men’s uses of “abjection” can offer an alternative, nonmoralistic model for thinking about gay male subjectivity, something which is urgently needed in the age of barebacking.

Anyone searching for nondisciplinary ways to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS among gay men—or interested in new modes of thinking about gay male subjectivity—should read this book.

David M. Halperin is W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality, Professor of English, Professor of Women’s Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.

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When Men Meet

Homosexuality and Modernity

Henning Bech

University of Chicago Press, 1997

For sociologist Henning Bech, the image of the male homosexual has become emblematic of the modern urban condition, in which freedom and mobility contend with transience and superficiality, in which possibility, energy, and engagement vie with uncertainty and restlessness. In this powerful and frankly provocative critique, Bech skillfully examines the distinctive relationship between urban modernism and the gay experience, exploring in compelling fashion its growing ramifications for the cultural mainstream.

Gay society has persevered, even flourished, in this highly charged urban environment, aestheticizing and sexualizing the spaces, both public and private, where men meet. With profound insight and honesty, Bech details this world, candidly reflecting on sex, friendship, love, and life as manifest in the homosexual form of existence. He convincingly demonstrates that, in the face of modern alienation, successful coping strategies developed by gay men are gradually being adopted by mainstream heterosexual society.

These adaptations are often masked by what Bech calls an "absent homosexuality, " in which sublimated themes of homosexuality and masculine love surface, only to be disavowed in expressions of social anxiety. This "absent homosexuality" acts as a kind of cultural filter, allowing key traits of gay life to be absorbed by the mainstream, while shielding heterosexual males from their own homophobic anxieties. Ultimately, Bech foresees, a postmodern convergence of hetero- and homosexual forms of exisce emergent from this urban landscape and, with it, a new masculine synthesis.

Certain to ignite immediate controversy, When Men Meet offers both a penetrating scholarly analysis of the modern homosexual condition and an unflinching cultural vision of the masculine in transition.

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Widescreen Dreams

Growing Up Gay at the Movies

Patrick E. Horrigan

University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

In 1973, a sweet-tempered, ferociously imaginative ten-year-old boy named Patrick Horrigan saw the TV premiere of the film version of Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand. His life would never be the same. Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies traces Horrigan’s development from childhood to gay male adulthood through a series of visceral encounters with an unexpected handful of Hollywood movies from the 1960s and 1970s: Hello Dolly!, The Sound of Music, The Poseidon Adventure, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Wiz.

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Word’s Out

Gay Men’s English

William Leap

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Sample Conversation: Conversation between two men, a salesclerk (S) and a customer (C). S: Can I help you find something? C: No thanks, I am just looking. [Pause while customer looks at merchandise] C: What are you asking for these? [Points to set of grey sweatshirts] S: Oh. I'm afraid they're not on sale today. But that colored shirt would look nice on you. [Points to a pile of lavender sweatshirts, which are on sale] C: Yeah, I know. I own a few of them already. [Grins] S: [Grins back; no verbal comment] C: Thanks for your help. [C walks off] The first book-length analysis of the language used by gay men. Do gay men communicate with each other differently than they do with straight people? If they do, how is "gay men's English" different from "straight English"? In Word's Out, William Leap addresses these questions in an entertaining account that looks at gay men's English as a cultural and a linguistic phenomenon. Whereas previous studies of "gay language" have centered almost entirely on vocabulary, word history, and folklore, Word's Out focuses on the linguistic practices-cooperation, negotiation, and risk taking-that underlie gay men's conversations, storytelling, verbal dueling, self-description, and construction of outrageous references. Leap "reads" conversations for covert and overt signs of gay men's English, using anecdotes drawn from gay dinner parties, late-night airplane flights, restaurants, department stores, and gourmet shops, and from other all-gay and gay/straight settings. He incorporates material from life-story narratives and other interviews and discussions with gay men, from gay magazines, newspapers, and books, and from events in his own life. The topics addressed include establishing the gay identities of "suspect gays," recollections of gay childhood, erotic negotiation in health club locker rooms, and gay men's language of AIDS. Leap shows how gay English speakers use language to create gay-centered spaces within public places, to protect themselves when speaking with strangers, and to establish common interests when speaking with "suspect gays," and explores why learning gay English is a critical component in gay men's socialization and entry into gay culture. Provocative and potentially controversial, Word's Out provides fascinating insight into the politics of gay experience by exploring the connections between language and daily experience in gay men's lives. "Word's Out is the first comprehensive linguistic ethnography of the North American gay male speech community. Word's Out is a significant contribution to language and gender research in general and to lavender linguistics in particular." --American Speech "The book is a superb example of gay studies at its best and as it should be. It deals with real people and uses theory only to clarify points, not to cloud issues or to display the author's cleverness." --Lambda Book Report "This work explores important insights into the politics of gay experience." --The Reader's Review "How gay men's English is different from straight men's English is one of the topics studied in this fascinating look at language and orientation." --Feminist Bookstore News "This book presents engaging analysis of a large number of instances of 'Gay English,' including banter at parties and gyms, poignant memories of trying to understand adolescent feelings of difference, several excerpts from fiction, a pair of 1980s popular songs, toilet graffiti, 1987 responses to two sex ads, interview responses, and some folk semantics." --Anthropological Linguistics William L. Leap is professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. His recent articles on gay English have appeared in New York Folklore, High School Journal, and in his edited collection Beyond the Lavender Lexicon (1995).

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The World Turned

Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture

John D Emilio

Duke University Press, 2002

Something happened in the 1990s, something dramatic and irreversible. A group of people long considered a moral menace and an issue previously deemed unmentionable in public discourse were transformed into a matter of human rights, discussed in every institution of American society. Marriage, the military, parenting, media and the arts, hate violence, electoral politics, public school curricula, human genetics, religion: Name the issue, and the the role of gays and lesbians was a subject of debate. During the 1990s, the world seemed finally to turn and take notice of the gay people in its midst. In The World Turned, distinguished historian and leading gay-rights activist John D’Emilio shows how gay issues moved from the margins to the center of national consciousness during the critical decade of the 1990s.

In this collection of essays, D’Emilio brings his historian’s eye to bear on these profound changes in American society, culture, and politics. He explores the career of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights leader and pacifist who was openly gay a generation before almost everyone else; the legacy of radical gay and lesbian liberation; the influence of AIDS activist and writer Larry Kramer; the scapegoating of gays and lesbians by the Christian Right; the gay-gene controversy and the debate over whether people are "born gay"; and the explosion of attention focused on queer families. He illuminates the historical roots of contemporary debates over identity politics and explains why the gay community has become, over the last decade, such a visible part of American life.

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Wrong

Reginald Shepherd

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999

The poems of Reginald Shepherd’s third book move among, mix, and manufacture stories, seeking to redefine the meaning of mythology. From the ruined representatives of Greek divinity (broken statues and fragmented stories), and the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, to the fleeting promises of popular music and the laconic demigods of the contemporary gay subculture, they sketch maps of a world in which desire may find a restless home. But desire leads the maps astray and maps mislead desire. The poems poems both enact language’s powers to create a world and enforce the world’s insistence (material, social, sexual, racial, historical) that mind (and body) surrender to circumstance. The struggle between these two halves that will never make a whole produces new myths of occasion, “packing the rifts/with sleeplessness, filling the gaps with lack.” In that space between promise and deprivation, Wrong builds its song.

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