Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene
Robert Alan Brookey | 2002-03-01 00:00:00 | Indiana University Press | 184 | Nonfiction
Reinventing the Male Homosexual examines the assumption that embracing the biological research on homosexuality is a viable political strategy for the gay rights movement. The biological argument for gay rights is treated as a ãbio-rhetoric,ä a means of incorporating scientific research into public debates.
Reviews
I encourage every homosexual man to read this book. It's short, well-crafted and probably the best summary of all those theories floating around about the "causes" of homosexuality. The author cleary shows how scientists were influenced by stereotypes in the interpretation of results (or just came up with wrong interpretations or results) or how experiments were poorly executed in the first place. But all the criticism isn't his one, he often just has to quote other scientists. The only thing I think he got wrong was when he criticised Bruce Bawer at the end of the book because he obviously hadn't read Bawer's book very carefully. But since Brookey's book is about something very different than talking about people like Bawer, I wouldn't blame Brookey too much for that one.
So, why is this book so important? Everywhere you can hear of read of old theories, possibly even from the 70s, long debunked but still repeated by some people. Just look at Lise Eliot's 1999 book "What's going on in here?" about the development of unborn children: She carelessly quotes Doerner's 70s experiments with rats (which were very weird to start with) and some other theory about stress leading to the unborn child becoming homosexual - therefore she describes stress as a "risk behaviour", cause the child could get the "sickness" homosexuality! If you know what those experiments and theories were really about or what they became criticised for, you can't take them seriously anymore - and that's very important for homosexual and heterosexual people. And that's why Brookey's book can be so important for your own view of your homosexuality.
By the way, please ignore the two reviewers claiming the book is badly written - it's absolutely not true and I wonder what reasons they had for writing this. It's not written like The Enquirer, of course, since it's a scientifical work, so if that's not your cup of tea, leave it on the shelf.
An excellent companion to Bruce Bawer's "A Place at the Table".
Reviews
If this is a rehashed version of someone's dissertation, two things are in order. First, the publisher should be ashamed for marketing this. Second, Mr. Brookey's advisor should be given a talking to. Brookey bites off far more than he can obviously chew with piece. Theoretical discussion is vague at best, and reflects just a mediocre understanding of the theorists he cites. Save your money.
Reviews
While happy that someone has taken on such an important topic, I was disappointed to find this book so poorly written and so confused in its theoretical grounding. I cannot recommend this book to any serious readers.
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