It took a while to get past the fear, the second-guessing, the sense of doom with every encounter but reading The Joy of Gay Sex helped me focus on the sheer bliss of it all, the ecstatic thrill of sex. For instance, from the introduction: “Sex is one of life’s chief pleasures.”Īs a 16-year old who’d followed my first, quite tame sexual experience that summer by dragging my then-boyfriend to a clinic for an HIV test-the two-week waiting period for results turning into an extended panic attack-I had never framed my desires in such unambiguously upbeat terms. This theme-daring in the seventies, downright revolutionary in the eighties-flows implicitly through the book’s frank and shame-free prose, and surfaces explicitly at several points in case readers might otherwise miss it. Despite such unavoidable omissions, the book nonetheless communicated a simple message that made an enormous impact on me as a horny but terrified teenager: that sex, including (or perhaps especially) gay sex, was about joy.
