Reviewed by: Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press by Kim Gallon Candace Cunningham (bio) Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press. By Kim Gallon. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. x, 216. $110 cloth; $26 paper; $19.95 ebook) In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press, author Kim Gallon examines how Black newspapers [End Page 103] in the interwar period created "Black sexual public spheres" through textual and visual representations of Black sexuality in editorials, letters to the editor, newspaper articles, and fictional stories. Gallon focuses on some of the most prolific Black newspapers of the time including the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam News, and Philadelphia Tribune. Gallon argues the Black press created multiple Black sexual public spheres that both challenged and reinforced conventional understandings of appropriate sexual behavior. These spheres redefined the definition of "race men/women" and introduced sexuality to the interwar definition of Blackness. Despite their mission to engage in racial uplift, Black newspapers regularly covered scandalous stories about African Americans. Simultaneously reporting on scandal and racial justice may have seemed like contradictory pursuits, but it reflected what reporters and editors imagined that their readership's changing demographic wanted. The Great Migration introduced these newspapers to a large working-class audience. Newspapermen believed this audience wanted to hear salacious stories about their "betters." This reporting exposed the Black middle-class' sexual exploits, therefore challenging the concept that such acts were the exclusive purview of the working-class. Gallon's research demonstrates that Black community members learned the same myths about Black women's sexuality as the white community—that respectable Black women were rare and more prone than their white counterparts to engage in sexually deviant behavior. The Black press created a Black sexual sphere that, through their coverage of Black beauty pageants and predatory lesbians, challenged and reinforced these myths. Black newspapers positioned interracial sexual relationships and marriage within the broader issue of racial segregation. They reported on these stories out of a belief that their readers wanted to know more about interracial celebrity couple's intimate lives. Yet, by [End Page 104] the dawn of World War II, Black newspapers were publishing fewer stories on the topic. Instead, they devoted more space to Black participation in the war effort. The Black press' coverage of gender-nonconforming men, gay men, and female impersonators during the 1920s and 1930s reflected an array of attitudes ranging from partial acceptance, to outright rejection. As with the other Black sexual spheres, Black newspapermen created this one because they imagined that their readers wanted visual and textual representations of queer Black men. Yet this period was short-lived. By the late 1930s the coverage was increasingly unfavorable as homosexuality became "synonymous with death of the 'race'" (p. 157). Black newspapers clearly envisioned themselves as conduits of racial progress. However, Gallon's research uncovers that in their efforts to satisfy their readers they also created a space to develop multiple sexual spheres. Pleasure in the News pushes us to reexamine what we think we know about the Black press. Many of us have spent countless hours reviewing Black media publications. They are an invaluable source about Black life, politics, and entertainment. Gallon's research is an important reminder that Black newspapers are also cultural artifacts unto themselves. Their value is not only in what they can teach us about specific people and events, but how they reflect Black American culture. This book will appeal to researchers in African American history, cultural history, gender history, journalism, and queer studies. It will be of particular interest to people who study Black sexuality, the Great Migration, the interwar period, and American migration and urbanization. [End Page 105] Candace Cunningham CANDACE CUNNINGHAM is an assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. She recently published an article, "'Hell is Popping Here in South Carolina': Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era" in The History of Education Quarterly. She is currently working on a manuscript about the role of Black teachers in the civil...
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