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

Americans have a lousy sense of history. According to the family values rage still in vogue, history goes only as far back as the 1950s—and only because the adults and family-makers of today watched the '50s portrayed on TV in the 1970s (Happy Days Are Here Again becomes Happy Days). Michael Bronski's new book The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom does us the favor of putting gay culture, the gay movement, and the conservative backlash against it in the context not only of American history but of the historical tensions between pleasure and the control of it that supposedly makes civilization "civilized".

It's no stunning revelation that Western culture has a long history of ambivalence towards sexuality outside of reproduction. Bronski diffuses the selective historical memory that informs many contemporary anti-gay arguments by putting a range of facts and traditions under the spotlight. He builds his analysis on a successful navigation between tensions: between pleasure and control, between assimilation and influence, between "family values" and the real burdens of raising children, between the contradiction of forcing the closet then fearing "latent" homosexuality, between different groups' experiences of oppression, between privacy and secrecy, and between reform and revolution.

Bronski begins by examining ambivalences towards the pleasurable aspects of sexuality, what Freud eventually crystallized as the conflict between the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle." Freud's acceptance of the idea that social reality depends on the control of pleasure, be it artistic expression, sexuality for its own sake, or other non-utilitarian activities, just codified the centuries-old either-or mentality that western cultures had built up around sexuality and value judgement.

By prioritizing work and production (including reproduction), scapegoating sexuality and doling out discreet amounts of pleasure in set rituals such as festivals and seasonal carnivals like Mardi Gras, the dominant culture keeps up an idea that pleasure is separate from "normal" life. Our culture is so based on regulating it that "the repression of pleasure seems natural, not even unfortunate." Separation of pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure, from other parts of life allows suspicion of it to be fostered.

Part of the suspicion gays and lesbians face is based on the fact that Western society historically has foisted unacceptable sexuality onto groups designated as "other." Within its context of ongoing ambivalence and fluctuating levels of acceptance or condemnation of sex, society attributes "hypersexuality" to its outsiders, rather than questioning traditional rules or reclaiming sexual pleasure as normal and valuable. This separates the subculture from the "regular" people and keeps up suspicion and devaluation of sex itself. Bronski details a variety of examples of how various subcultures and ethnic groups became linked with sexuality itself in the popular imagination. This may have exemplified guilt by association, but it's as well-crafted an idea as the archetypal "traditional" family of the 1950s. Since homosexuality is defined specifically by sexual difference, this manner of scapegoating gays and lesbians as "not normal" is exacerbated.

As Bronski moves through history to Stonewall and events afterwards, he comes down clearly against assimilation. He argues that privacy is not a real (and certainly not legally recognized) protection for gays when they have no real option for safe visibility in the larger world. While outsider communities create and maintain their own cultural traditions, doing so, while not a bad thing, ultimately doesn't displace restrictive and prejudiced social norms in the dominant culture. Backlashes against gay and lesbian pockets of open safety, whether in the form of court cases or physical assaults, may come at any whim.

Bronski frequently argues that gays and lesbians "are just like everybody else" is a self-defeating strategy because it gives tacit agreement to other people's decision of what's "normal." When not all choices are equal or accepted, the difference between privacy and secrecy depends on who's got the power to dictate whose "privacy": when the choice is made personally, it's privacy; when made by social pressures, it's the closet.

As long as conservative definitions are allowed to stand unchallenged, the powers that be can control not only the ideas of what's normal but also dictate public vision of what the "other" groups are like. Conservatives have used gay culture against itself, for example, to promote the idea that gays and lesbians are better off economically than other people. Portraying gays as a "pleasure class," Bronski explains, allows anti-gay conservatives to claim that protection of gay civil rights is a "special" right unneeded or deserved by those who already have more than their fair share of life's pleasures.

There were only a few weak areas in Bronski's choice of historical references; in particular an invocation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin as a metaphor for the way mainstream culture views relations between homosexuals and children. But those minor blips were not enough to mar the even intelligence with which Bronski handles his main points. The value of The Pleasure Principle lies in that it offers concrete historical details and analysis that provide points for critique of anti-gay sentiment, especially the more knee-jerk "traditional" hostility promoted by right-wing conservatives.

Ultimately, the tensions our culture creates between pleasure and control can cause the breakdown of the ambivalences they foster. Bronski, in the final analysis, feels that the gay rights movement is a threat to "society"—"the social and political structures that maintain heterosexuality as a dominant social institution." Our culture, through civil rights and liberation movements, has become influenced by the positive experience of pleasure. Backlash plays up traditional tensions as "the norm" to contain such influence, rather than allowing exchanges on what just might be valuable in our culture. Valuing sexuality and pleasure, then, can be a "beginning of freedom" for people of all orientations.

Reviewed by Jane Haldiman