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Immense positive change has taken place in English people's sexual and emotional lives. This is reflected in changing family forms and greater acceptance of sexual variation of all kinds. These changes were propelled forward by the transformation of pregnancy from an uncontrollable risk to a freely chosen product of sexual activity. There are many women throughout the globe who do not have access to adequate maternity care and contraception, and neo-liberal economic measures are eroding the improvements in people lives made possible by the political and social agitation of earlier generations. Acknowledging positive change in the past should give confidence to those who seek change in the future.

Contemporary immigrants who enter the United States to work or settle are assumed to bring with them habits of crime, laziness, and lack of hygiene. This chapter puts these modern rumor cycles into historical perspective by examining ways in which these beliefs are based on earlier stereotypes generated by previous immigration waves. They often blamed foreigners for introducing diseases such as leprosy and typhoid fever to the country, just as Mexicans were blamed for the new swine flu epidemic. The literal illness, then as now, symbolized a more subtle threat to the body politic: a new population marked by immorality, sexual promiscuity, and political disloyalty. Particularly, foreigners serve as scapegoats after catastrophes such as fires or floods. Rumor contributed to the creation of an increasingly restrictive immigration policy in the United States, and continues to generate an atmosphere of distrust against newcomers.

This chapter discusses methodology and places the book in the context of related scholarship on the subject. In particular, it takes issue with literary scholarship whose approach is based on a history of ideas or discourses and thus eschews attention to authors' biographies, or experiences of authors — and thus ultimately ignores historical experiences.(It addresses Walter Michaels' Our America, which is an influential example of such scholarship that addresses modernist novels and their relationship to 1920s nativism.) The chapter also argues with studies of the relationship between modernist style and politics that give attention to stylistics per se, apart from plot and character. It discusses the common plot that unifies the 1920s novels at issue, discusses why critics have missed this plot, and offers an alternative argument about modernist style in the context of modernist plots and characters, as well as the historical context of the mobilization. In so doing, it traces the deconstruction of the sentimental novel of seduction by Progressive Era realist writers and the rise of the modernist, racist promiscuity plot, which the three 1920s novels at issue here share with each other, and with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.

By the 1930s, the postmobilization tale of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway (the racist promiscuity plot) was already being subverted, while still being utilized. In Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, there is still a central promiscuous Anglo woman; there are love relationships with ethnic Americans, and often with Jews; there are obsessed romantics; there are sometimes mentally deficient characters, and there are lovers who have special relationships with a promiscuous woman. But now the ethnic character is not scapegoated; the masculine soldierly ideal comes under attack; the figure of the charity girl is parodied, and the military is openly criticized, its concern over venereal disease mocked. The postmobilization novels of the thirties are no longer haunted by sexual liaisons between military figures and women — as were the twenties novels, as well as the 1917-1918 military authorities; rather, the figures of the prostitute and the charity girl are now fetishized, not romanticized or problematized.

John uses the issues of food and sex to continue his indirect denunciation of “Jezebel.” He focuses on these issues in the passages that feature female characters in order to connect the activities of “Jezebel” (ɛιδωλόθυτα and πορνɛία) to “Babylon's” heinous acts focused on eating (cannibalism) and sex (promiscuity). John also uses gender stereotypes (specifically that women are weak, undisciplined, emotional, and ultimately dangerous) to suggest that his rival, a woman, is unfit to lead the churches.

This chapter provides a summary of changing sexual behaviour and attitudes in the first two thirds of the 20th century. It shows that English sexual mores were shaped by ignorance of physical sexuality and reproduction, the estrangement of the genders, and deep-seated reticence. The contribution of highly sexually active (previously described as promiscuous) heterosexual and homosexual men and women to sexual change was important, but such people remained a minority and the majority of the population limited their sexual activity severely in the interwar period and continued to be sexually conservative well into the post-war period.

This chapter examines Kannada films from the 1990s. It discusses how from the late 1980s onwards, Kannada cinema becomes depleted because of a lack of signifiers — the cinema does not ‘mean’ in the way it had done hitherto. The region is absent as an imagined community in these Kannada films and this perhaps accounts for them being unable to ‘mean’. It considers one aspect of Kannada cinema that has distressed its avid followers — the vulgarity that appears to overwhelm it in the early 1990s. It also looks at the treatment of women in these films, specifically the notion of feminine promiscuity. It discusses the attitude of Kannada cinema towards Bangalore and how a large number of films are either ‘framed’ as stories being related by filmmakers or involve the process of filmmaking in some way.

This chapter examines the sexual behavior of pastors, priests, and ministers in the United States. Every church requires exemplary behavior and most of them require clergy to vow compliance at ordination. However, secret worlds were being opened and liberalized ethics were being espoused and some clergy declared a God-given right of “justice-love”, which means consensual sexual relationship outside of heterosexual marriage. This chapter discusses the many fractures of the ministry fault line over human sexuality including sexual abuse, promiscuity, and ordination of homosexuals.

This chapter examines how evangelical abstinence educators in Africa rhetorically construct the condom. It argues that they construct the condom as (1) a tool for marital fidelity; (2) a tool for saving lives; (3) part of holistic community-based development; and (4) a tool for female empowerment. After demonstrating the prevalence of these four themes, it turns to an analysis of an evangelical statement of conscience on the AIDS crisis as an example of how these constructions of the condom affect public discourse about AIDS prevention. Although evangelicals tend to view the condom as a tool for promiscuity, in Africa the potential to save lives trumps the potential for increased promiscuity. The perceived lack of choices presented by the dire health situation in Africa provides rhetorical space for a positive construction of the condom as lifesaving. This medical focus echoes U.S. evangelicals' construction of abstinence as the healthy choice.

This chapter looks at the spread of the matriarchal myth in Europe, examining how the myth gained popularity in Europe, specifically in Germany, and explains the contributions of German ethnology to the myth and studying Julius Lippert's version of it. It then identifies the challenges made to Lippert's assertion that the earliest human societies were sexually promiscuous. The chapter also covers the notions of property in relation to sex and marriage, the notions of gender that can be found within the matriarchal myth, the concept of the Aryan mother, and the late participants in the matriarchal debate.

This chapter examines why many conservatives consider all gay people as promiscuous. Of course, some are promiscuous, and promiscuity is a legitimate expression of sexuality for all sexual beings. The rhetoric of gay promiscuity, however, has often been a tool used by a homophobic society to justify institutionalized discrimination. The irony is that when gays and lesbians have expressed a desire to be in “legally” binding committed relationships, they have usually been told that they are immoral for coveting and wanting to debase an institution that is designed solely for one man and one woman. This irony was quite poignant as the author sat in the homes of some of the men he interviewed, who had been in relationships for over 40 years, or as he listened to narrators who felt liberated by being single and promiscuous or by being single and celibate.

This chapter introduces another important constraint on mate choice; namely, that choosers are the object of choice themselves. It focuses on the mechanisms underlying mutual mate choice, notably how preferences are dynamically adjusted in light of the chooser being the chosen. It begins with the simplest form of mutual mate choice, when individuals reciprocally prefer each other's phenotypes. It then turns to the widespread phenomenon of mutual mate choice in systems that are socially promiscuous: both males and females mate multiple times, but both males and females express preferences for particular phenotypes in the opposite sex. Mutual mate choice becomes more constrained in social monogamy, where one can only be paired with a single partner at a given time. The chapter discusses how partners reach pairing decisions and how pair bonds are maintained and transgressed in both hetero-and homosexual couples. Finally, it briefly covers the interesting case of mate choice in hermaphroditic species.

This brief response catches glimpses within Karmen MacKendrick’s work, glimpses of what one might call a queer-incarnational apophasis. In her attention to mourning, melancholia, and haunting, MacKendrick attunes us to the queer temporality of a past that never quite was, for the sake of a future that might be genuinely new: such would be the structure of “the possible.” Reading MacKendrick through Laurel Schneider and José Muñoz, this essay attends to flashes of enfleshment—of livability and even justice—in the midst of an unbearable present. Here incarnation becomes promiscuous, ordinary, and spatio-temporally queer: not-quite, but not-quite-not; almost and all over the place.

Shilts comes “out” to his parents and family. Graduating from the University of Oregon, journalism jobs remained elusive for Shilts. Shilts begins work as a freelance writer for The Advocate, later hired as a full-time correspondent and relocates from Oregon to San Francisco. Shilts’s reporting covers some of the nation’s earliest gay rights efforts via state legislatures and courts, employment discrimination, parental rights, youth suicide, alcoholism/drug abuse, and social issues confronting LGBT individuals. Early stories on communicable and sexually transmitted diseases among gay men. Shilts clashes with David Goodstein, The Advocate’s publisher. Shilts meets his first lover, Daniel Yoder, while traveling the U.S. covering efforts to repeal non-discrimination laws in various cities, including Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” effort in Miami, Florida.

Shilts and book editor Michael Denneny make controversial decisions about how to get And the Band Played On properly promoted and reviewed. The New York Post’s screaming headline about “Patient Zero” sets in motion worldwide publicity for the concept that one man, Gaetan Dugas, was responsible for spreading AIDS in North America. Shilts’s review of Dr. William Darrow’s cluster study of gay men in Los Angeles proves faulty, although mainstream journalism quickly goes with the “Patient Zero” concept and Shilts is quickly cast as a national expert on HIV-AIDS. Shilts unveils his “AIDS was allowed to happen” posit. A subsequent review of Shilts’s work is mostly critical, particularly from LGBT sources who fault Shilts for allegedly scapegoating Dugas.