Kim T. Gallon, "Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press" (U Illinois Press, 2020)

New Books in African American Studies · Dec 22, 2020 · 1h 11m

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-conformity, imagining that this coverage was a source of pleasure and debate for Black readers. Gallon argues that this editorial practice actually exposed class, gender, and sexuality divisions between…