Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press by Kim Gallon (review)

Over the course of several months in 1921 and 1922, the Half-Century Magazine, a Black middlebrow magazine based in Chicago, held a contest that sought to answer the question, "Who Is the Prettiest Colored Girl in the United States?" This contest was judged by Chicago luminaries, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the famed anti-lynching activist. The unlikeliness of Wells-Barnett's involvement with a beauty contest underscores the dichotomy between beauty and lynching, while the fact of her involvement unfurls the truth of lynch law's imbrication in all facets of Black life and the panoply of tools—including a beauty contest—needed to destroy it.

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality, Kim Gallon traces these complex negotiations, pressures, and uses of sexuality in relation to the political commitments and pressures in the Black public spheres of the Jim Crow era in the decades before Ebony magazine would revolutionize images of Black beauty and sexuality. This monograph is extremely welcome in its contributions to our understanding of three major yet still understudied areas: (1) the Black press, (2) Black readership, and (3) the ways sexuality was discussed and represented by Black people. All of these areas have been perceptively examined by other scholars in different contexts—for example, Elizabeth McHenry and Eric Gardner on Black readership and Michele Mitchell and Shane Vogel on sexuality—yet, there is still much that is unexplored. In particular, scholarship that brings together multiple Black periodicals is in short supply, and Gallon's work provides both an eagle's perspective and a more on-the-ground view on the affinities and, to a lesser degree, the differences between the newspapers that make up what she calls the Black Press—the words capitalized to indicate its status as an institution on par with the Black Church—during the early twentieth century.

Pleasure in the News intervenes in periodical studies and African American studies in two key and intersecting ways. First, while Gallon discusses the Black Press's relationship to the white press, her main focus is on what Mitchell has identified as a post-Reconstruction turn "inward" that focused on intraracial notions of gender and sexuality. Gallon discusses how "the Black Press' imagination of readers' desires was not simply about creating community but also about working out where specific groups of people fit within the black community" (6). To this end, Gallon juggles different discourses to demonstrate that they are far from subsumed into one monolithic discourse about sex and sexuality. Second, at the core of the book's argument is the balancing act that the Black Press had to engage in "to merge respectability with sexuality within the pages of newspapers" (11). The institution was not, in other words, just straightforwardly against discussions of sex and sexuality as one might expect. Discussions of respectability and sexuality were both in tension with and worked in concert with each other while the newspapers "simultaneously constructed and rejected sexuality as a site of pleasure that fostered dynamic black sexual expressions" (7). In other words, instead of focusing on prohibitions against discussions of sex in public, Gallon works to expand our idea of the discourses and representations of Black sex and sexuality.

These Black sexual public spheres were forged through the interactions and work of the newspaper editors and reporters and the readers who engaged with their work (2). The focus on the readers' letters throughout the monograph is particularly excellent; Gallon uses the letters page not to determine demographic information about actual readers but to demonstrate the concerns and pressures that the readers prioritized for discussion in the public sphere. In effect, Gallon's reading of these letters shows how newspapers were sites for discussions and negotiations about sex and sexuality. The excerpts from readers' letters, such as those in the Pittsburgh Courier's advice column and the Baltimore Afro...