>Where I part company with the erotophobic Left (and their allies on the Right
and Center), however, is in their conclusions that suppression and censorship
of consensual erotic expression and behavior is the ideal solution.
I generally agree with you, but there is a lot more to it than that. There is also an equally idealist (and moralizing) tendency in some quarter of the "radical" sexual left: ie. Sex Panic. As Michael Warner more or less put it, stuff like erotic vomiting and unsafe sex with "carriers" (ie bugchasing and gift-giving) are inherently subversive (and therefore good) precisely b/c they question the limits between sex and sickness, public health and individual "choice." (All "questioning of limits" is both a moral obligation and an act of heroism, in this view. Nevermind where the questions are going.) Public sex is good b/c it undermines the public/private distinction. (Although when capital does that, it's bad; or is it? I can't remember.)
So, while I can see in general how it would be better to be sex affrimative than not, the limit of the whole "sex-positive" thing seems to me that it's an "up-with-people" version of psychoanalysis, in which sex is still the secret of the self (the totality, the social body, the revolution, etc.). Only in this version, you're "frank" or "open" about it. That still doesn't tell us much about the political economy of sexuality, or the way informs class formation and identification, etc. which seems to me to be the point for the left.
Christian