Essays in _Critical Models_ were mainly written during the late 50s and the 60s, I believe (I don't have the book at hand). The passage you quoted says that "The abominable paragraph on the law books against homosexuals managed to find safe passage into _postwar_ liberated Germany" (emphasis added). "Tough Baby" was put in the section dated 1944 in _Minima Moralia_. So I suppose Adorno evolved in his thinking on sexuality (good for him, but too late for homosexuals who perished in the concentration camps).
The main reasons I was criticizing Adorno are (1) "Tough Baby" represents a typical left-wing twist to homophobic discourse (which was not at all limited to Adorno) and (2) I'm interested in identifying how left-hegelian dialectic leaves untouched the categories on which it is parasitic.
>[editorial aside from
>Curtiss: before jumping on that quip, understand that this comes
>from an essay whose thesis is that the genital sexuality has been
>integrated into capitalism and that the destruction of non-genital
>sexuality or "partial drives" is the form that sexual repression
>takes today]
I hear you, but I've come to think that starting with Freud tends to lead us along an unnecessary detour. For instance, the passage from _Critical Models_ makes perfect sense without our efforts to locate Adorno's psychoanalytic-Marxist musings on the "integration of genital sexuality into capitalism," etc. One can say 'true' to such musings, one can say 'false' to them, one can refuse to make sense of them, one can get entertained by them -- any response would do, it seems. In other words, they are empty of historical content. Further, in an inverse form, the same psychoanalytic musings can be easily put to a homophobic/sexist purpose: e.g. "non-genital sexuality or 'partial drives' have been integrated into capitalism while the destruction of genital sexuality is the form that sexual repression takes today." One may refute such musings with all kinds of empirical evidence to the contrary, but fundamentally they can survive empirical challenges with their formalism intact. That's the poverty of left-Hegelian dialectic that I mentioned earlier. In other words, it is an otherworldly dialectic that refuses to be anchored in history.
Yoshie