Pleasure in the News

Abstract

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press is an examination of the coverage of sexuality in the Black Press between 1925 and 1940, otherwise known as the interwar period in the United States. In the book, Kim Gallon argues that the Black Press made sexuality a major topic of news to appease African American readers’ imagined desires for sexual coverage. In so doing, Gallon argues that Black Press coverage produced a number of black sexual public spheres that offered early-twentieth-century African Americans opportunities to debate and discuss particular sexual topics. In their simplest form, black sexual public spheres were discursive arenas in which readers debated and discussed sexual matters. They also served as mechanisms for readers to critique and sound off on a wide range of issues, including respectability, interracial marriage, divorce, the sexualization of women’s bodies, and homosexuality within early-twentieth-century black communities. Overall, Pleasure in the News provides an expanded understanding of the ways readers interacted with the Black Press and representations of sexuality.