This book steers black sexual politics toward a more sex-positive trajectory, navigating the uncharted spaces where social constructionism, third-wave feminism, and black popular culture collide to locate a new site for sexuality studies that is theoretically innovative, politically subversive, and stylistically chic.

How San Francisco became America's capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars

What would happen if we could stroll through the revolutionary history of the 20th century and, without any fear of the possible responses, ask the main protagonists - from Lenin to Che Guevara, from Alexandra Kollontai to Ulrike Meinhof - seemingly naïve questions about love? Although all important political and social changes of the 20th century included heated debates on the role of love, it seems that in the 21st century of new technologies of the self (Grindr, Tinder, online dating, etc.) we are faced with a hyperinflation of sex, not love. By going back to the sexual revolution of the October Revolution and its subsequent repression, to Che's dilemma between love and revolutionary commitment and to the period of '68 (from communes to terrorism) and its commodification in late capitalism, the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat gives a possible answer to the question of why it is that the most radical revolutionaries like Lenin or Che were scared of the radicality of love. What is so radical about a seemingly conservative notion of love and why is it anything but conservative? This short book is a modest contribution to the current upheavals around the world - from Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong, from Athens to Sarajevo - in which the question of love is curiously, surprisingly, absent.

When Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl hit bookstores in 1962, the sexual revolution was launched and there was no turning back. Soon came the pill, the end of censorship, the advent of feminism, and the rise of commercial pornography. Our daily lives changed in an unprecedented time of sexual openness and experimentation. Make Love, Not War is the first serious treatment of the complicated events, ideas, and personalities that drove the sexual revolution forward. Based on first-hand accounts, diaries, interviews, and period research, it traces changes in private lives and public discourse from the fearful fifties to the first tremors of rebellion in the early sixties to the heady heyday of the revolution. Bringing a fresh perspective to the turbulence of these decades, David Allyn argues that the sexual revolutionaries of the '60s and '70s, by telling the truth about their own histories and desires, forced all Americans to re-examine the very meaning of freedom. Written with a historian's attention to nuance and a novelist's narrative drive, Make Love, Not War is a provocative, vivid, and thoughtful account of one of the most captivating episodes in American history. Also includes an 8-page insert.

The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

Contraception and abortion were not originally part of the 1960s women's movement. How did the women's movement, which fought for equal opportunity for women in education and the workplace, and the sexual revolution, which reduced women to ambitious sex objects, become so united? In Subverted, Sue Ellen Browder documents for the first time how it all happened, in her own life and in the life of an entire country. Trained at the University of Missouri School of Journalism to be an investigative journalist, Browder unwittingly betrayed her true calling and became a propagandist for sexual liberation. As a long-time freelance writer for Cosmopolitan magazine, she wrote pieces meant to soft-sell unmarried sex, contraception, and abortion as the single woman's path to personal fulfillment. She did not realize until much later that propagandists higher and cleverer than herself were influencing her thinking and her personal choices as they subverted the women's movement. The thirst for truth, integrity, and justice for women that led Browder into journalism in the first place eventually led her to find forgiveness and freedom in the place she least expected to find them. Her in- depth research, her probing analysis, and her honest self-reflection set the record straight and illumine a way forward for others who have suffered from the unholy alliance between the women's movement and the sexual revolution.

The language of money has informed medical, psychological and political theories of sexual desire for at least 300 years. Desire, figured as libidinal energy, represented potential work-power and spending-power and hence a form of personal 'capital', an economic resource for both the individual and the collectivity. This book explores how this view