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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JULY 5, 1996

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A provocative philosophy of gay male desire

Sex Between Men

An Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men, Postwar to Present

by Douglas Sadownick Harper, 270 pages, $25 hardcover

Reviewed by Daniel R. Mullen

How long has it been going on? Or better yet, what does it mean when they do that?

In Sex Between Men, Douglas Sadownick articulates what gay men have been doing with each other for the last 45 years, and what all this time has done to men who are gay and who desire. His book offers a "defense of

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This "emerging identity" lasted as long as the war, and "the years following showed how difficult the formation of such an identity would be without structure or gradients through which the energies could flow and shape themselves."

There were no gay organizations or magazines, and men's psyches played out "wrestling matches between need and guilt" for being gay.

The apologetic homophile movement of the '60s allowed gays to be open as long as they didn't mean to be "that way." Unable to separate internalized homophobia and desire, "very few were able to do more with their hurt feelings than snuff them out."

between men

After Stonewall, it became chic, and less shameful, to separate intimacy and sex, and to pursue the act anonymously. With the new militancy, sex was now the right of gay men.

A collective search for the gay spirit had begun, only to be quashed by the abstinent '80s. "AIDS implied the opposite of what the sexual revolution had promised," writes Sadownick. Sex was again feared.

When a safer-sexual revolution emerged in the '90s, men re-embraced desire, but over-idealized beauty-in part because AIDS meant ugliness.

Sex Between Men is less a history of what men do between the sheets, and more of what gay sexuality was and what it has meant to generations. Sadownick is a big-city boy, who writes a big-city book. The city may be where trends begin and cultures change more noticeably, and this is the context in which he "shows how and why the sexual behavior of gay men has been influenced by historical and sociological changes since World War II."

douglas sadownick

sexuality" that is one part history, one part psychotherapy and one part personal interviews.

Sadownick is author of Sacred Lips of the Bronx, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. He also has published articles in the Advocate, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Native and other gay press.

Sex Between Men is a result of Sadownick's friendship with Michael Callen, whom he calls the co-creator of safer sex. "It bothered him that gay men had never come up with a defense of sexuality in the manner of the feminists he loved," said Sadownick.

After nursing Callen for a year, and after AIDS took his life, Sadownick set out to write the book he wanted.

Sadownick shows the reader that the military during World War II was a place, far from life and wife, where latent and situational homosexuality flourished. It was a unique stage set for male bonding and phallocentric brotherhood.

Sadownick's perspective is well-defined: Gay identity is more biological or essentialist than it is a social construction. "Gayness . . is a step in evolution, not a result of economic and social changes alone." He talks of a rising libido, of a positive progression of sexuality. This bent is incidental to an understanding of the history of the gay movement and the changing meaning of sex as he describes it.

But Sadownick's emphasis on the dynamics of the unconscious mind is purposeful and clear throughout the book. His theories about the psychology of desire and gay male psychic development are narrowly defined. You may need to brush up on some of the psychodynamic terms of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Yet it is unique in this way. And when it gets through all the history, it serves the reader best as a provocative philosophy of gay male desire.

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