What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity
by David M. Halperin
University of Michigan Press. 167 pages, $22.95
DAVID HALPERIN has a distinguished history of setting aside accepted ways of thinking about gay men’s issues and examining them anew with a clarity and rigor that produce valuable and sometimes surprising insights. This was true of his books on how Western culture has viewed same-sex-attracted men in the past, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) and How To Do the History of Homosexuality (2002). It is no less true of his latest, which asks us to re-examine how certain segments of society are reacting to gay men and AIDS today.
Halperin begins by examining how medicine and the media have dealt with reports of gay men having unprotected anal sex in the time of AIDS.
