Male Lust: Pleasure, Power and Transformation

Edited By Kerwin Kay, Jill Nagle, and Baruch Gould
ISBN: 1-56023-981-6

Reviewed by Kevin Tipple
Rating ****

As a white heterosexual male that grew up idolizing John Wayne and wanted desperately to be Roger Staubach (or maybe an astronaut) I am probably symbolically what Kerwin Kay means when he writes of the privilged white male. Personally, I have never accepted the argument that I, or any other white male, are automatically privilged based on race, but I understand the argument.

I never thought once about my sexuality growing up and never had the gender confusion that so many others had. All I knew, was that I didn't have a chance with the girls and that the guys that did, were the guys on the football team that could barely string a sentence together. It was only after becoming a father, after my first son was born and survived an intense six-week ordeal in the Neonatal ICU wing of the local Hospital, that I began to contemplate being a male and my sexual role or identity.

As noted in the introduction, questions of sex and power are irretrievability linked and form the image of male sexuality. The argument is made that because the privilged male cannot recognize his own male sexuality because he is in power and he therefore must examine those that are "marginalized" or on the edge of society. He can only learn by examining the sexuality from the viewpoint of the disabled, transgendered, minority and others. He has to understand the "marginalized" view of sexuality before he can begin to contemplate his own.

This is done in the anthology through the use of essays, stories and poems from all points of view. This collection covers a wide range of male sexuality and desire from both genders and various persuasions. Everyone has a voice and these voices are freely and deeply expressed. Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, but every perspective is covered. All brought together to make the reader think.

It would not be fair to single out one or two essays or points of view and comment on them. Not only would it inappropriate to consider just a couple of works, but also it would not be representative of the whole. There is an incredibly broad spectrum of work here and it needs to be considered as the whole and not as isolated bits.

In a textbook style format, this anthology is complex and definitely not relaxing reading. Serious work went into this well written collection and every piece of it is guaranteed to provoke inner thought and debate.

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