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The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

Page 19

by Lawrence Block


  Contact Lawrence Block:

  Email: lawbloc@gmail.com

  Blog: LB’s Blog

  Facebook: LB's Facebook Fan Page

  Website: www.lawrenceblock.com

  Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

  * * *

  John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Ebooks

  3 Is Not A Crowd

  Beyond Group Sex: The New Sexual Life Styles

  Come Fly With Us

  Different Strokes: Or, How I (Gulp) Wrote, Directed & Starred in an X-Rated Movie

  Doing It!

  Eros and Capricorn

  The Male Hustler

  Older Women and Younger Men: The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome

  Sex and the Stewardess

  The Sex Therapists

  Sex Without Strings

  The New Sexual Underground

  The Taboo Breakers

  Tricks of the Trade: A Hooker’s Handbook of Sexual Technique

  Versatile Ladies: Women Who Swing Both Ways

  Wide Open: The New Marriage

  The Wife-Swap Report

  Beyond Group Sex:

  The New Sexual Life Styles

  John Warren Wells

  Lawrence Block

  * * *

  copyright © 1972, 2012, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Introduction

  In the following pages, you will make the acquaintance of a rather unusual assortment of men and women. You will meet and listen to:

  A young woman with a passion for personal privacy who enjoys watching other people have sex, and who runs an ad to that effect in underground newspapers . . .

  A small-town minister who has discovered bisexual group sex . . .

  A man who seduced an eleven-year-old girl and maintained a monogamous relationship with her for seven years . . .

  A brother and sister who went through a marriage ceremony, live together as man and wife, and participate in group sex with strangers . . .

  A man who has spent the past thirty years having sexual relations with his mother, his father, his brother, his sister, his wife, his sons, and his daughter . . .

  An executive who spends a substantial portion of his income on prostitutes . . .

  And a few other persons whose sex lives are similarly at variance with “normal” standards of behavior.

  What you are reading now is at once an introduction to a book and to a group of individuals. Indeed, these individuals are the book. It is their words that comprise the greater portion of the text, either through the re-creation of interviews or the verbatim transcription of their letters. I have tried to keep my own comments to a minimum, butting in when necessary to summarize or interpret.

  These introductory remarks, too, ought to be kept to a minimum. Let me just say a few words on how this book came about, how it was written, and what point I like to think it serves. Then I’ll get off the stage.

  • • •

  For quite a few years now I have been writing books on various aspects of human sexual behavior and what is called variously the sexual revolution and the new morality. In the course of this I have interviewed innumerable persons at greater or lesser length and have engaged in a good deal of correspondence, some of it brief, some of it quite extensive. Not surprisingly, I possess an insatiable curiosity about the manner in which different persons come to terms with their sexual desires; without this curiosity I would be well advised to get into some other line of work.

  Only a small portion of these interviews and correspondence leads to anything that winds up in print. I consider an interview sufficiently productive if it does no more than enlarge my own understanding. A while ago I realized that I was closely familiar with several case histories that would make excellent chapters—the only trouble was that they didn’t much fit into books. They didn’t come under any of the usual headings.

  I suppose a similar state of affairs once prompted the invention of succotash.

  Thus I decided to put these various bits and pieces together. As I outlined the project, I realized that there was a common factor uniting these chapters. Each concerned an individual who, for one reason or another, had come to possess (or be possessed by) urges and desires that he himself readily recognized as abnormal. Each ultimately elected to do his own thing, to march to the beat of that different drummer. And each has come to terms with his conflict, some with more success than others, but all in a way that ought to be relevant to the overall topic of today’s sexual mores.

  The chapters are complete in themselves and can be considered by themselves. But I would hope that the reader would tend to regard them not only individually but also in terms of one another—i.e., as different views of men wrestling with demons.

  • • •

  A discussion of method may be useful. Material is presented in each subject’s own words, but it is by no means a verbatim transcript—except in those chapters where letters are quoted. Over the years I have grown out of the habit of using a tape recorder. I have found not only that it puts some subjects off—although most people get used to it after a while—but that it gets in the way of conversation because one has to stop periodically and change reels. Furthermore, the process of having a tape-recorded interview typed is both difficult and expensive, and leaves one with a massive sheaf of typescript, much given over to trivia, and very hard to put in order.

  I have found it more useful to remember what is said to me, and then to re-create the conversation at the typewriter, reproducing both the factual matter and the tone and style of the subject’s speech. With that reservation, and with the presumably obvious fact that I have carefully changed the names of all people and places and any data which might render any person identifiable, all of what follows is precisely what was said to me.

  • • •

  Introductions are curious things. The reader hits them at the beginning of the book and then goes on to the book itself. The writer gets the whole business backward, first writing the text, then walking out front and introducing it. You’ve just now sat down with this book; I’ve been sitting with it long enough to hatch an ostrich egg. There’s one point where I trust we’re in agreement, however; we’d both like to get this introduction over with as soon as possible, so that you can listen to the voices of some very fascinating men and women, and so that I can go around the corner for a beer.

  So be it. You may be charmed or disgusted with the people you are about to meet. You may think that some of them ought to be locked up. But I don’t think you’ll forget them very quickly.

  I know I won’t.

  New York City

  January 1972

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