Unlike most writers on the topic of gay men and risky sex, David Halperin liberates gay male subjectivity from psychology, demonstrating the insidious ways in which psychology's defining opposition between the normal and the pathological subjects homosexuality to medical reasoning and revives a whole set of unexamined moral assumptions about 'good' sex and 'bad' sex.
How we can talk about sex and risk in the age of barebacking-or condomless sex-without invoking the usual bogus and punitive clichés about gay men's alleged low self-esteem, lack of self-control, and other psychological 'deficits'? Are there queer alternatives to psychology for thinking about the inner life of homosexuality? What Do Gay Men Want? explores some of the possibilities. It doesn't waste time telling us what it will do or what it has just done-it just does it.'-Don Kulick, Professor of Anthropology, New York University
