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Summer Sex |
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The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture |
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What Wild Ecstasy |
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14 Latin American countries exonerate rapists if their victims agree to marriage.
During sleep, the penis and the clitoris gain and lose erections approximately every 90 minutes. |
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Sex eFFecTs By Steffen Silvis |
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It's hard to recall a time when sex wasn't used to sell everything from ice cream to shoe laces, but the desirous flesh now pressed to our screens or hanging from billboards would have been impossible a mere 30 years ago. The latter part of this century has seen an astounding revolution unlike anything ever witnessed, its noble aim nothing less than to free sex and sensuality from the fetters of church, state and mindless custom. Two new books comment in very different ways on the battle and on what price glory came. John Heidenry was more than a combatant in the sexual revolution. As the editor of Penthouse Forum he was the vanguard of the movement. He was a patriot to the cause and has paused now in its aftermath to take stock of what was wrought. As with a surviving Jacobin in the Napoleonic age, he notes that great victories were won as well as excesses committed. His book What Wild Ecstasy is a social history of the United States in the later part of this century that no one else has ventured to write. The book's chapters follow the five stages of sexual intercourse--Desire, Excitement, Plateau, Orgasm and, finally, Resolution. Subtitled "The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution," it's a story in which the ending is known. Reading about the lines of customers waiting to get into the back rooms at the Mineshaft or the Hellfire Club is like reading the passenger list for the Titanic. Indeed, Heidenry's final subsections bear titles like The Bonfire of the Fantasies and Sex Among the Ruins. Heidenry, like the historian Nennius, has "made a heap of all [he] could find," yet this is not a jeremiad. However bleak the outcome, much good came with the sexual revolution. Many struggles inspired by the period continue, such as equal rights for women, safe and legal abortions and gay rights. Just as E.L. Doctorow constructed an entire era in Ragtime through portraits of individuals, Heidenry builds his history with biographical sketches. Hefner, Dworkin and the Daughters of Bilitis are joined by a rogues gallery of swingers, G-spot experts and tantric gurus. Humble footsoldiers also quietly contributed to the zeitgeist, such as Ted Marche, a middle-aged ventriloquist who carved a modest 6-inch cock one night at the family dinner table and went on to become the founder of a million-dollar dildo empire. There's also Willem de Ridder, a prominent figure in the anarcho-hippie Fluxus art movement whose magazines put him on the hit list of both the FBI and the Manson Family, and who finally escaped America with a young porn-starlet and golden-showers artiste named Annie Sprinkle. The earnestness of our elders sometimes seems comic and tragic in equal measures. Copies of Screw, Finger or Suck now seem as quaint as past numbers of Look, and the spectacle of beleaguered housewives greeting their husbands at the door frocked in Glad Wrap or Dale Evans cowgirl garb seems pathetic. Yet one feels a certain wistfulness for this "simpler time" devoid of plagues and unafraid of experimentation. At times, What Wild Ecstasy is unwieldy. Through poor editing or a patronizing assumption that the reader is suffering from a faddish attention deficit, paragraphs and incidents are too often repeated. This aside, Heidenry's work is a perfect antidote to Life-like retrospectives of fashion and catastrophe that pass as History for the masses, or the cult of personality political biographies that have appropriated too much of social history. Daniel Harris' The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture is both a social history and an unapologetic lamentation for the demise of a people. Though AIDS has done much to damage queer culture, Harris sees the plague of assimilation into the bland mainstream of American culture as the most deadly to gay identity. From the kitschification of AIDS with the shameless commercialization of the Quilt, to the sanitized and alienating porn of late, nothing escapes Harris' lacerative tongue. Though Harris' plaint centers on what he sees as the decline of a separate queer sensibility, he does raise concerns about the death of racial and cultural diversity in American society at large. "What is happening to gay culture," Harris writes, "parallels what has been happening to popular culture on a much larger scale ever since the invention of a metaphor central to our understanding of the historical mission of America: the melting pot." The specter of this monolithic culture appears everywhere Harris looks. Glossy magazines like Genre and Out have discarded high culture for hip-hop posturing; rarefied epicureanism has been jettisoned for a "feeble imposture of straight life"; even the beloved moviehouse divas of yesteryear have become fallen idols to be mocked, as when New York drag queens commemorated the 1981 release of Mommie Dearest by dressing up as Joan Crawford and kicking life-size effigies of daughter Christina through Greenwich Village. Although many of Harris' points are astute, he seems trapped at times by his own arguments. He is aware of this problem, stating that only a nostalgic fool would want to prevent assimilation, since the flourishing of traditional forms of gay culture depends on the persistence of oppression. Yet one senses Harris yearning for a ghetto ruled by parvenus, where every day is an Easter parade and communication is conducted through quotes from strident show tunes. Who can blame the current generation of young queers for rejecting the trappings of an oppressive past? For Harris, young queers are hopelessly coffled to mass culture's honeywagon, becoming conforming consumers lacking any tribal loyalty. But a generation that can produce a novelist of the caliber of Scott Heim and a filmmaker such as Todd Haynes cannot be "lost." |
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