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This chapter focuses on a selection of teen couples in the 1950s, who were “going steady” and experimented in intense and intimate sexual acts, including premarital intercourse. Going steady—a practice that was in the mainstream of postwar culture—was a pervasive site of sexual initiation, exploration, and exhilaration. Often, it was also the context for sexual coercion, unintended pregnancy, and punitive intervention. Steady relationships illustrate both framed and veiled widespread premarital heterosexual activity. The increase in sexual promiscuity fueled what was arguably the most important ideological development in postwar youth sexual culture: the “permissiveness with affection” sexual standard. This belief in the acceptability of heavy petting and even intercourse between members of a steady couple provided girls a compass for navigating the minefield of sexual contradictions.

This chapter discusses current depictions in the behavioral science literature of the relationship between Latino/a migrants’ sexual cultures and HIV risk, and analyzes conceptual limitations that may hinder deeper understandings of how these two issues are interrelated. There is a tendency to draw conclusions about cultural differences between migrants and the U.S.-born Latino population that are often unsubstantiated by empirical findings, primarily because behavioral studies typically are not designed to measure cultural factors. The chapter also examines the limitations caused by a propensity to focus exclusively on the migrants’ behaviors in the United States, without inquiring about their lives prior to migration or their continued contact with their home countries. Finally, the chapter analyzes the consequences of a widespread reliance on simple acculturation measures, and on now problematic constructs such as simpatía, familismo, machismo, and marianismo.

This introductory chapter traces the rise of sexual autonomy among young American women. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, urbanization presented opportunities for many young women to pursue sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage. This further developed in the earlier half of the twentieth century when immigrant and working-class young women explored the amusements and commercial opportunities of city life, often on the arms of young men who paid for sex. Younger girls joined in despite scrutiny from the new juvenile courts. The rise of dating practices eroded parental and community control, and prostitution lost ground to taxi dancing, stripping, and erotic dancing. The period also saw the legalization of contraception and birth control which accelerated the separation of heterosexual sex from reproduction. In all of these ways, the sexual culture before World War II was already shifting and changing, opening up certain possibilities for sexual independence.

This chapter explores the history of the “B-girls”—young women employed by bars or nightclubs to act as a companion to male customers and to induce them to buy drinks, and usually paid a percentage of what the customers spent. B-girls were part of important changes in sexual and commercial culture in the 1940s and 1950s. During World War II, they joined prostitutes, pickups, and victory girls in bar-based heterosexual encounters, strategically adapting their practices to evade social protection authorities. This further developed in the 1950s when the B-girls created a professional subculture which blurred the line between commercial and casual sex and took advantage of citizens' declining support for legal campaigns to control women's sexuality. With creativity and ingenuity, mid-century drink solicitors expanded the possibilities for women's sexual license.

This chapter presents analyses of the sex marketplaces of Latino bisexual men in New York City between 2000 and 2009. Chapter aims are to identify the role that sexual marketplaces play in the sexual lives of Latino bisexual young men, particularly the impact of historical and geographic differences, as well as their implications for HIV prevention research and interventions. The following overriding research question was explored: what are the political, technological, and social enabling conditions that have produced the behavioral differences from 2000 to 2009 that we have observed? More specifically, how do male friendship groups function as mechanisms of “intimate surveillance” vis-à-vis sexual partner selection, and what are the digital platforms (e.g., cell phones, Internet cruising) that enable these interactions? How might we frame these “local sexual cultures” within what we refer to as “intimate/participatory surveillance,” and what social philosopher Gilles Deleuze has called “societies of control”?

There is only very limited research on the sexual landscapes of Latino bisexuals. This is in part due to the structural barriers confronted by expressions of bisexuality in Latino cultures in the United States and elsewhere. This chapter looks at the “erotic landscapes” of bisexually active Latino men in New York City. The concept of erotic landscapes is used as a way of linking what might be described as “sexual geography” (the spatial organization of sexual experience) with “sexual culture” (the symbolic meanings and representations associated with sexual conduct in different social and cultural settings. A case study of the sexual life of one informant is presented from his first sexual encounter at the age of fifteen into his twenties, and the implications for the prevention of HIV infection and sexually transmitted infections are discussed. A salient point is that public venues for sexual activity do not necessarily increase HIV risk.

This chapter explains how congregations' leaders devise policies and practices to address the sexuality issues facing members and how they attempt to channel sexual identities, sexual behaviors, and relationships into religiously sanctioned expressions. It describes how clergy and lay leaders take into account local social forces such as the demographic makeup of particular neighborhoods and the sexual cultures of residents as they negotiate between, on the one hand, the doctrines and rules of the larger denominations that lend them legitimacy and authority and, on the other hand, the needs and beliefs of the community on which they depend for survival. The chapter argues that congregations' responses to sexuality are a matter of negotiation at several social levels as clergy and lay leaders attempt to reconcile official teachings with local concerns about sexuality under a variety of organizational constraints and in a variety of social and institutional environments.

In the conclusion, I propose that thinking with autonomy and access, while thinking against consent, might reframe some of the central ethical and political questions #MeToo raises. For while some have argued that nonconsent is the common denominator of #MeToo’s wrongful sex and others have argued that sex discrimination is the common denominator, I suggest that neither nonconsent nor discrimination identify the core wrong of #MeToo’s wrongful sex. Instead, the pervasive problem underlining so many of the incidents that constellate #MeToo is men’s sense of sexual entitlement, their leveraging positions of power to exact sexual gratification, and the consequent undemocratic, asymmetrical distribution of pleasure. These problems, and not the problem of nonconsent, are the connective tissue across #MeToo stories and scandals. Querying how and why powerful men constrain (indexically) women’s autonomy and access, rather than presuming all such sex nonconsensual, is more politically generative for feminist movement.

This concluding chapter focuses on Herukhuti's explanation of why he founded the Black Funk Center. His states that black people can and do create revolutionary sexual cultures that can become the foundation for centers of sexual health, well-being, and decolonization. Black communities need more sexual cultural centers like Black Funk, but since sexuality and eroticism tend to be ignored, there are few political ideologies or organizations that see such centers as a part of black revolutionary movements. By exploring spaces and sites where narratives and performances of the body provocatively intersect with expressions of interior movement, the chapter argues that the need for such centers has already been articulated elsewhere—in profane sites of memory.

This chapter argues that funk produces mythologies about the body, labor, leisure, and pleasure, and that these occur in music as well as in black fiction, art, and performance centered on the potential force or energy that excites or that neutral sexual pleasures might yield. Adding to Tony Bolden's “Groove Theory: A Vamp on the Epistemology of Funk,” where he argues that the sensing techniques that black dancers employ have been central to innovations in black musicianship generally, the chapter discusses how funk's sensing techniques innovate sexual cultures as sites of memory. It brings three disciplines together—literature, performance, and dance—to theorize nonhuman agency in the street party Freaknik, as well as black strip clubs.

The conclusion argues that the U.S. Army first attempted to gain control of almost all aspects of soldiers’ sexuality and then tried to carefully manage and regulate that sexual economy to best fulfill the army’s missions. In the process, it created a new kind of militant masculinity, one especially encouraged for enlisted soldiers. As a guiding principle, army leaders often used the notion of “military necessity” to shape their actions in controlling soldiers’ sexuality. They suppressed soldiers’ sexual behaviors and expressions that they perceived as running counter to the good of the service or creating inefficiencies and encouraged those aspects of sexual identity that the army believed benefited the service. The army’s efforts, which took shape in very different ways, depending on the time period and geographic context, were resisted by many soldiers and their sexual partners, who sought sexual expressions that sometimes ran counter to the army’s institutional goals.

This chapter details differences in the forms of sexual culture between groups of middle class and working class. Systematic differences in Uncle Go’s advice to different gay correspondents are related to Go’s perception of the men’s class background, and the different expectations that are placed upon middle class and working class men, respectively. The impact of Uncle Go’s understandings of Thai masculine and feminine gender and sexual cultures on his replies to correspondents is also considered.

This chapter examines two contradicting perspectives of two gay men from different generations regarding gay sexual culture during the 1960s to 1970s. The first one argues that during the peak of gay culture, gay men did not care about whether or not they would be infected by AIDS from unprotected sex, instead they looked forward to the enjoyment the intimacy brought to them in public sex spaces; this narrative is dubbed as the desirable narrative “queer” sexual culture. The second one counter-argues that the promiscuity during the 1960s paved the way for unhealthy sexual relations that resulted in the spread of AIDS, thus only focusing on the negative effects of sexual relations. Neoconservative gay journalist Gabriel Rotello, and Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and Gregg Araki’s film The Living End (1992) supported the second gay man’s claim.

This chapter studies Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent to illustrate the heterogeneity of the Pakistani population in Houston along the axis of sexuality. Though stigmatized, criminalized, marginalized, racialized, and homogenized, Pakistani Muslim American gay men narrate their lived experience in terms of invocations of South Asian epistemologies of same-sex sexual eroticism and relationships and narrative traditions, a religiously conceived transnationality, and appropriations of Western epistemologies of gay identity. Their narratives are a corrective to the heterosexual transnational Muslim population movements and community formations typically represented in scholarship on Muslim Americans. The complex intersections of race, religion, sexuality, and transnationalism in “transnational Muslim American sexual cultures” advance the exploration of heterogeneity of the Pakistani immigrant experience and guide the inquiry in this chapter.

This chapter examines representations of sexuality in William Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary, focusing on the patriarchal context in which sexual subjects are constructed in Faulkner’s culture and fiction. It interprets the main protagonist’s sexual practices as “a powerful tool” to subdue, silence, and objectify the girl he desires. The chapter considers Sanctuary and another Faulkner novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), as “different aspects of a Southern sexual culture” and argues that they both highlight various forms of sexual abuse as well as the female characters’ resulting experience of psychic trauma. It explores and challenges those readings that characterize the girl in Sanctuary as the one who instigated her own rape. Drawing on psychiatric studies on sexual trauma and trauma neurosis, the chapter explains the girl’s behavior in the courtroom in relation to the structure of white male paternalism.

This chapter reviews the importance of sacred subjectivity to various black sexual cultures. In its proposal of nonmonogamy as an alternative practice for funk's genealogy of affection, relationality, and sexuality between human and nonhuman beings, the chapter addresses M. Jacqui Alexander's question about sacred subjectivity. Using queer legal theory, debates about the marriage crisis in black communities, and cultural depictions of nonmonogamy in the science fiction of Octavia Butler and the erotica of Fiona Zedde, the chapter reveals how funk attends to alternative models of family and community to challenge the heteropatriarchal recolonization that happens with capitalism and the Western model of family.