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This isn't right at all. The issue for Marcuse isn't the acceptability of previously-taboo sexual preferences in the first place; its the way in which that acceptability is generated. If the acceptability comes from a critical mass of people exercising their own independent choices, for Marcuse it's a good thing: "[r]eactivation of polymorphous and narcissistic sexuality ceases to be a threat to culture and can itself lead to culture-building if the organism exists not as an instrument of alienated labor, but as a subject of self realization." Eros & Civilization, ppg. 191-192. What Marcuse is criticizing is pseudo-sexual liberation handed out by a "culture industry" just as controlled by the bourgeois and alienated from the great mass of the population as the means of industrial production. It's also tied up in Marcuse's (and the rest of his fellow Frankfurt School colleagues') instinctive revulsion at the American culture they got plonked down in, which they viewed as horrifyingly common and unrefined compared to their highly-individuated and sensitive central-European lives got ripped away from them.
As Horkheimer wrote in his letter on Freud, "the greater a work, the more it is rooted in the concrete historical situation." As refugees from Central Europe, who had been tutored in all its rich cultural heritage had to offer, they were inevitably ill-at-ease in the less-rarified atmosphere of their new American environment. On occasion, this alienation meant unresponsiveness to the spontaneous elements in American popular culture - Adorno's unremitting hostility to jazz, for example, suffers from a certain a priori insensitivity. But at the same time, it provided an invaluable critical distance from the culture, which prevented the Institut from equating mass culture with true democracy. The category of "repressive desublimation" which Marcuse was to develop years later to characterize the pseudo-liberation of modern culture, existed in embryo in the personal experiences of the Institut's members. Having known an alternative cultural milieu, they were unwilling to trade in its promesse de bonheur for the debased coin of the culture industry.
As Adorno later explained, the phrase "culture industry" was chosen by Horkheimer and himself in Dialectic of the Enlightenment because of its antipopulist connotations. The Frankfurt School disliked mass culture, not because it was democratic, but precisely because it was not. The notion of "popular" culture, they argued, was ideological; the culture industry administered a nonspontaneous, reified, phony culture rather than the real thing. The old distinction between high and low culture had all but vanished in the "stylized barbarism" of mass culture. . . .
Increasingly, the Institut came to feel that the culture industry enslaved men in far more subtle and effective ways than the crude methods of domination practiced in earlier eras. The false harmony of particular and universal was in some ways more sinister than the clash of social contradictions, because of its ability to lull its victims into passive acceptance. With the decline of mediating forces in the society - here the Institut drew on its earlier studies of the lessening role of the family [!] in the process of socialization - the chances for the development of negative resistance were seriously diminished. Moreover, the spread of technology served the culture industry in America just as it helped tighten the control of authoritarian governments in Europe. Radio, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, was to fascism as the printing press had been to the Reformation.
~Jay, Martin: The Dialectical Imagination, pg. 215-217.
I've never encountered this passage before (my first-hand knowledge of his work doesn't extend much past The Aesthetic Dimension and some isolated fragments), but it did occur to me while writing my post that he probably thought or said something like this at some point - that there's sexuality under capitalism, and there's sexuality in a future post-alienated state, and they're distinct phenomena that require distinct treatments. But I didn't want to bloat the post by going into those distinctions, so I just tried to provide a gloss on the passage I quoted, particularly these sentences:
Since this passage is specifically about the nature and function of sexuality under capitalism, rather than a non-alienated sexuality, I think the summary I gave was basically correct, albeit simplified.
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