Sex and gender.(publisher's note)

At the Still We Rise march for poor people during the Republican National Convention, one man held a homemade sign printed with the words "Abstinence Kills" and, on the next line, "No Thrills." I saw this as a reminder that the prospect of a life without pleasure makes safety rather unappealing. But a colleague looked at the same sign and thought it meant that plenty of thrills were possible in an abstinent life. Thinking about the abstinence approach to sex education, I wondered, is pleasure too good for people of color? Or only too good for the poorest and youngest?

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The combination of pleasure, power and the unknown is what makes sex and gender so hard to bring into the public discourse about race. Let's face it, anything to do with our sexual parts often leads to rabid expressions of conflict and judgment. No discussion is more intimate and mysterious, more potentially embarrassing or threatening. To some extent, we can't know why we want what we want, why we feel like men, women or neither, or how something can scare us and draw us in at the same time. It's the loss of (self) consciousness that makes pleasure, well, pleasurable. Not only that, but what we want, and who we are, is as fluid and changeable as a chameleon. There are apparent contradictions. A male friend of mine acknowledged recently that women, including feminists, find him attractive because he believes in both spanking and equality.

Denial is one reaction to not knowing. Our reaction is to embrace, to dig up how our desires and identities play out in the larger world as well as in our psyches. The people presented in these pages have pushed away fear, marginality and more than a small bit of shame to bring us these stories and analyses. More than most, this issue ...