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

by Michael Bronski

A provocative look at the gay rights movement explores its impact on breaking down traditional societal structures and uses practical examples from history, politics, and popular culture to illustrate the interaction between gay culture and the mainstream.

Genres: Sexuality, Nonfiction, LGBT, History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 2000

About the author

Michael Bronski has written extensively on LGBT issues for four decades. He has published widely in the LGBT and mainstream press and his work appears in numerous anthologies. He is a Senior Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

[Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book on Homophobia

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite some outdated references to the military and marriage, this book remains frighteningly relevant in the age of Donald "the killer clown" Trump