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What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity | 
| Author: David Halperin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 322098
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0472116223
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.7662
EAN: 9780472116225
ASIN: 0472116223
Publication Date: August 21, 2007
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Product Description
“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 cliches 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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| Customer Reviews:
 Those looking for an anwer to the title question will be disappointed, but... June 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In this rambling essay of 109 pages plus 43 pages of endnotes, David Halperin has some sensible things to say about reasons for risky/unprotected sex. Halperin follows on Lauren Berlant's warnings against construing persons "as fully present to their motives, desires, feeling, and experiences, or as even desiring to be" and the general neoliberal reduction of human behavior to rational calculation (cost-benefit analysis). Persons having (not just gay men!) seek union with another, which involves not showing suspicion or distrust in the partner. Women risk pregnancy and disease feeling that they cannot ask the man they want and/or depend upon if he is disease-free or with whom else he has had intercourse. Research particularly on Africa women has recurrently found them feeling that they cannot protect themselves, that their man would not tolerate demands for using a condom that imply he might pose a danger to them.
Halperin totally fails to consider this desperation and feeling of powerlessness occurring among "First World" urban gay men, though I think that it occurs with some frequency. The desperation may be more psychological, less economic than for the sub-Saharan African women, but surely exists with some frequency. It was a Scandinavian AIDS researcher who suggested that the prime HIV-transmission risk was love.
While neglecting power imbalances, and not getting into the need to trust and/or the need to appear to trust the lover, Halperin follows Michael Warner in suggesting that sexual union may be an all-important project, that is, that putting other things ahead of one's ego and self-interest is fundamental. (Indeed, a great deal of literature focused on love involves lovers running risks -- particularly in coupling with those forbidden to the lover, such as Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guenivere.) Not only gay men want union when they have sex, rather than to be thinking about potential dangers and what others consider unsuitabilities in liaisons with the partner (the sex, race, class of the other being among the unsuitabilities).
Branching out from quoting Foucault, the very Francophile Halperin discusses pleasures of abjection -- pleasures that saints as well as sinners seek out. Halperin delves into writings by Marcel Jouhandeau and Jean Genet on ecstatic conceptions of abjection. (Halperin often uses "queer," and attempts to hold onto some gay/lesbian conflation that is not at all heuristic in what he is writing about in this book, but oddly labels Jouhandeau a "gay man.") Halperin rightly distinguishes the pleasures that some individuals feel in abasement and self-abnegation from having a "death wish" -- or even a lack of self-esteem outside particular sexual scenarios.
Halperin seems to me reasonable in challenging the death-wish interpretation of seeking sexual abjection and in joining the challenge of the neoliberal conception of humans as hyper-cognitive, ever-calculating. Rather than gay men being uniquely deficient in rationality, the imputations of rationality to sexual conduct of persons of all sexual orientations is erroneous, and much HIV transmission-prevention intervention is deeply flawed (even without getting into the contempt for empirical evidence of much US-government-funded "education").
I think that the short book would have been better without the opening Fred/Foucault binary, and with a less sweeping title tat indicates its narrow fous: maybe "What Do Gay Men Who Have Unprotected Intercourse Want?" The answer to that question that some have provided is suicide. Research in Australia, Scandinavia, and northern Europe (where empirical research on sex can be funded) has been that gay men (like others!) don't want to think about risks when "in the moment" and want pleasure and union that are at least interrupted by stopping and putting on a condom.
As for the question that is Halperin's title, I think that gay men want liberty, equality, and fraternity (did I claim to be free of Francophila myself?). Much political mobilization has been for equality -- in the US, the ability to marry and to serve in the military. Liberty has been subordinated to what some of us regard as a heteronormative "gay agenda, and the initial gay community response to the AIDS epidemic has (as Halperin cogently reminds us) been discarded in favor of treating risk as a matter for individual calculation and self-protection ("Prevention ceased to be a matter of collective, communal responsibility and became a matter of duty (or its dereliction) on the part of individuals," as he wrote.)
Before delving into French discourse about the ecstasies of abjection as lauded by some French virtuosi of abjection, Halperin noted that "it is our inflated conception of the intentional, cognitive subject that leads us to exaggerate both the culpable irresponsibility of our risk-taking behavior and the heroic transgressiveness of our defiance of social norms." This is a not-undeserved slap at those of us who romanticize a heritage of challenge to heteronormativity and at cherishing sexual dissidence (of which Genet, or at least Jean-Paul Sartre's "Saint Genet" is the epitome).
I think that Halperin -- building explicitly on work by Barry Adam, Kane Race, Eric Rofes, and others -- provides a sensible critique of much of the hysteria about gay men's irrational self-destructiveness. Way too much of the book is given over to exegesis of a fugitive piece from the Village Voice in 1995 by Michael Warner at a time when there was much hand-wringing about a "second wave" of HIV-infection among gay men. Warner's article is appended.
 the past and future of HIV prevention December 1, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
An amazing consideration of gay male subjectivity produced in response to questions posed by the misdirection in HIV research when it comes to gay men. The work he does with the "grandeur" of "humiliation" and Genet is particularly wonderful. Halperin's humble readings there are still dazzling my brain. Well worth your time--be you HIV researcher, activist, academic, or homo!
Provocative Thoughts September 19, 2007
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
Halperin, David. "What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk and Subjectivity", The University of Michigan Pres, 2007.
Provocative Thoughts
Amos Lassen
Many think of homosexuals as being sick and this has been the predominant answer since gay liberation has come to fore. Times, like everything else, change and doctors are again looking at the nature of gay men especially as regards their motives in taking risks while the AIDS epidemic is still ongoing.. Suddenly a rethinking about the issues of self esteem, "lack of self-control" and "various other psychological "deficits" has become popular. In his essay, Professor David Halperin gives a new approach to describing the lives of gay men.
Halperin looks at the limits of desire and shows that they cannot be explained through the analysis of each individual psyche and instead proposes a "poetical-philosophical-political exegesis in smooth and sleek language which makes the book a small treasure in the field of gay studies. He looks at the idea of bare backing or unprotected sex and shows that the key to understanding is not in the realm of psychology because it attempts to hide moral assumptions on the nature of sex/ Instead he looks to the various disciplines of queer thought which provide extremely interesting possibilities for the exploration of what gay men really want and uses readings by both obscure and well known queer theorists. In this theory which he provides he shows that gay men use abjection to formulate alternative and non-moralistic models to think about the subjectivity of the modern gay male. What we get are creative and non-judgmental ways to hinder the spread of the AIDS virus as well as news to consider our lives.
I am sure that this sounds like heady stuff but Halperin writes in a way that everything is totally comprehensible and understandable. It's good to have a voice like this to weigh in with a new opinion.
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