Customer Reviews

What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity

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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).

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 Freud/Foucault binary, and with a less sweeping title that 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.

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.

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!

Thank you David Halperin for this wonderful little book. The kind of thing that's a cherished reading for its passion, acumen, honesty, brilliance--all of which of course involve serious "risk" in our time dominated by a whole new range of taboos, fears, cliches, and closets.
It was just as inspiring as other books I've read from you, including One Hundred Years.
Namaste
Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio

I thought I was buying a book that might actually attempt to answer the question in the book's title. Instead,it ended up being an academic analysis of why gay men like to have unprotected sex despite the risks. The book quickly reached the profound conclusion that they do it because "it feels good." For that we need all this densely academic pondering? The essay failed to address some of what I feel really does motivate gay men, and contribute to risk-taking as well: the powerful,sometimes incessant need for self-validation, particularly regarding looks, sexiness,desirability and masculinity; the wonderful allure of fantasies and the desire to fulfill them in real life; the aching despair of ageing, which affects risk-taking; the inhibition-reducing effects of drugs/alcohol; the power of sensuality and pleasure. We all have our theories of "what gay men want." I wish I knew;that's probably why I bought the book. Were I to even try an answer, I would say "We want it all: to be gods among gods,loved as men without mistrust or the suffocation of our imaginations and sense of adventure." But then, that's probably another book..