Fans pick 100 books like Caribbean Pleasure Industry

This is the book that revolutionized the way social scientists think about sex work.

We know that sex work is gendered (more women work as sex workers than men) and at the same time women have made significant gains in the formal labor market. This book sought to answer the question of why sex work continued to be so prominent even though “outside options” were growing for women. 

Sex work integrated itself into the industrial system. Modern sex work has adapted to changing business practices and technology. Why? Because there is still a strong demand for the provision of intimate services and human sexual connection.  

In my own work on male sex workers in the US, I found that race played a key role in the market—determining prices and popularity, for example. 

While sex tourism can also play on race and ethnicity and their sexual stereotypes, most countries do not have the American system of race. This book was the one that showed me how male sex workers in another country with racial dynamics similar to those in the US. 

But the biggest takeaway from this detailed ethnography is that sex work is work but also acting—sex workers are providing a service that requires them to play specific roles with their clients, and many times these roles are based on sexual/racial tropes.

Playing into racial stereotypes is one-way sex workers remain in the business.

If you want to know how economists think about sex work (which is, after all, a market transaction) this is the book to go to. 

This is a collected volume, but if you were interested in how economists do work on sex work and what the major findings have been in the process, you would want to read this book.

There are technical issues covered here in terms of data, how research on sex work is different in developed versus developing countries, and the online market for sex work. 

It also contains a great discussion of the public health issues involved and what we know about sex work and its relationship to STIs.  

This book is the one that attempts to show, from a variety of angles, how Male sex work operates primarily in Western society, but more importantly takes a deliberately global vision of the process. 

Male sex work operates along cultural and social definitions of gender and sexuality, in addition to culturally defined subjects like work, risk, and sexual transactions. This collected volume covers both the long history (from ancient times) as well as the current spatial dimensions of male sex work. 

I really like this book because it drives home the point that you need to think carefully about the time and place before beginning a social science or public health approach to male sex work. 

In We Are Having This Conversation Now, Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr blow up the conventions of academic work on epidemics.

In a series of thirteen short dialogues they reflect as activists, media-makers, and scholars on the history, present, and future of AIDS. The reflections on AIDS-related culture and conversation they share, will spark for readers critical questions about how personal experiences, community, cultural production, and interpersonal relations come together.

Doing this kind of reflective work is particularly important now, as we need to begin to understand not only HIV/AIDS, but how it impacts the experience of living amidst other viral pandemics including COVID-19. 

AIDS was the pandemic before Covid. Unlike Covid, it mobilized people to take the science and efforts to find a cure into their own hands – especially people on the fringes of society. Nothing like this had ever happened before. It appeared to mark a watershed where medicine would become a servant of the people rather than people being enslaved to its commercial priorities. Sadly this is not how things worked out. The discovery of Triple Therapy was a high point of modern medicine but we have gone downhill since then with few if any drugs saving lives the way Triple Therapy did. Impure Science shows you vividly what we are up against.

Peter Piot was a young microbiologist at a lab in Belgium, in 1976, when he was assigned to analyze specimens in a thermos bottle shipped up from Zaire, where villagers were dying of a horrific and unknown disease. The thermos contained a virus that came to be known as Ebola. This was the event, as his book vividly recounts, that led Piot to a long and distinguished career in infectious viral diseases, from Ebola to AIDS and beyond.

In Reports from the Holocaust, Larry Kramer charts his own journey into AIDS activism, through a collection of his articles, speeches, jeremiads, and public pronouncements dating from the earliest days of the AIDS crisis. A combination gadfly, angry prophet, activist conscience, and provocateur, Larry was also a huge pain-in-the-ass and an unyielding and loving advocate for the gay community—all of which is on full display here. The book includes his incendiary “1,112 and counting,” written in 1983, which first awakened me (and the rest of the gay community) to the political dimensions of the AIDS crisis, as well as his speech four years later, that led to the formation of ACT UP. I defy you to read this book and not want to take to the streets in protest.

Emily Martin’s work was some of the first things I read when I wanted to understand how we understand medicine.

There’s such a gap between the health information we’re given and what we actually believe and Martin really covers how Americans have understood the concept of immunity and how we’re influenced by popular culture and the media.

This book is absolutely crucial for understanding both how we look at immunity and understanding how doctors are not free of bias. 

This book is exactly what the title promises, and a great place to start.

It’s written by a Swazi health economist who has worked on HIV in Africa for more than 30 years; I have learned a lot from Whiteside and his research over my years of covering this issue. The book looks at the biology and epidemiology of HIV, and also at all the ways it shapes societies.

Whiteside takes complicated concepts of population dynamics, sexual networking, AIDS, and geopolitical security and explains them briskly, clearly, concisely. His focus is the global AIDS epidemic, but his own work and the book are both deeply rooted in Africa.