Friday had tried in the late 1960s to write a novel in which she devoted “one entire chapter in the book to a long idyllic reverie of the heroine’s sexual fantasies,” as she described it. But her editor, a man, balked. “If she’s so crazy about this guy she’s with, if he’s such a great fuck, then why’s she thinking about all these other crazy things . . . why isn’t she thinking about him?” he asked.
Sensing a hostile environment, Friday chose not to finish her novel. Instead, she took out ads in newspapers and magazines to begin work on a nonfiction book. The ad for this project read: “Female Sexual Fantasies wanted by serious female research. Anonymity guaranteed,” and she solicited women to write and submit their stories.
Friday’s first sexual fantasy entry in My Secret Garden is her own fantasy, one in which she dreams about sharing an orgasm with a man under the cover of a wool blanket at a Baltimore Colts–Minnesota Vikings game as Johnny Unitas scores a touchdown. Dozens of other sex stories follow in the book. A new magazine, Ms., founded by Gloria Steinem and other feminists, was not pleased, and its editors had little time for the subject matter of My Secret Garden—or its author. “This woman is not a feminist,” proclaimed the Ms. review of Friday’s book. The author took solace in “the millions of women who went on to buy My Secret Garden,” she said.
Erica Jong had better luck with Ms., having developed a few years of feminist credibility with her published poetry. No matter that “cunt,” the new N-word for female, appeared multiple times in Fear of Flying, her first novel, about a woman who engages in quickie sex with total strangers—or, as Jong famously coined it, “the zipless fuck.”
“New American Library saw my book as the first breakthrough novel about female sexual fantasies,” said Jong.
Fear of Flying owed its success, in part, to two principal players from the Sexplosion years.
“Oh, I loved that book,” Jong said of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. “I think I learned something from it: the switching back and forth between past and present. I reread Portnoy’s Complaint many times and I realized that one need not worry about leaping back and forth, that it could be very readable. His books were proof to me that it could be done.” While Jong credited Roth’s writing style, it could not be denied that the sexual derring-do of his novel helped to develop a readership for a funny book about anonymous sex, even one written by a woman.
Equally important, John Updike wrote a rave review of Jong’s book in The New Yorker, in which he called Fear of Flying a “lovable, delicious novel (each chapter garnished with epigraphs),” which brought the book to the attention of other notable critics, who treated it as a serious work of fiction and not a potboiler like Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place or Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls.
Erica Jong and Nancy Friday, however, were in the minority. During the Sexplosion years, men were most likely the storytellers and women, if they had any status at all, were their critics—critics who would increasingly be heard objecting to certain taboos, especially those dealing with sex and violence.
In 1974, Stanley Kubrick took A Clockwork Orange out of circulation in the United Kingdom due to accusations that the film inspired copycat rapes and other violent acts. As his wife, Christiane Kubrick, recalled, “When it was released in England, it was blamed unfairly for the increase in crime and there were cries to ban it. We received hate mail and death threats.”
Anthony Burgess was one of those who grew to hate the film, so much so that he eventually turned his novel into a play, which included the stage direction: “A man bearded like Stanley Kubrick comes on playing, in exquisite counterpoint, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ on a trumpet. He is kicked off the stage.”
While Kubrick’s film came under attack in England, the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that Mike Nichols’s film Carnal Knowledge was obscene, and banned it. For a moment in 1974, sexual expression in pop culture got a reprise when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision, ruling that the film did not “depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way.”
“ ‘Carnal Knowledge’ Not Porn,” blared the Variety headline. But no sooner did Hollywood’s bible publish its page-one story about Nichols’s film than FBI agents in New York City arrested Deep Throat star Harry Reems, who was later hit with an indictment in Memphis, Tennessee, on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines.
Hollywood stars, from Warren Beatty to Jack Nicholson, held parties to help pay Reems’s legal fees. Who knew? Any actor could be the next if he or she appeared naked or simulated sex or simply said “fuck” in a movie or onstage. And Mike Nichols, still smarting from his own legal mess, recalled, “I found myself at all these fund-raisers with that actor with the big dick.”
Several sex-themed movies suddenly didn’t look so lucratively attractive. One of those was Blue Movie.
In 1975, Ringo Starr, having forgotten his bad acting experience in the movie Candy, held the option to Terry Southern’s novel Blue Movie and thought he had Mike Nichols on board to direct at Warner Bros. Then the deal unraveled. Southern wrote to studio head John Calley, pleading that they not miss this opportunity to make “the porn to end all porn.” It didn’t depend on Nichols, in Southern’s opinion. “What about Stanley? Or Coppola?” he wanted to know. But Kubrick and Coppola were also suddenly not interested—and never would be. What did it matter that Harry Reems eventually got his Deep Throat conviction overturned? No one saw the advantage of being the next sex martyr.
Except for Gore Vidal.
Undaunted by the memory of having his Myra Breckinridge ruined by Hollywood, Vidal continued to believe in this long-gestating screenplay he’d written—one that mused on the anarchic politics, insane extravagances, and sexual perversities of an ancient Roman ruler named Caligula. Since no motion picture studio—major or minor—would touch it, Vidal found a complete film novice to produce it: Bob Guccione, publisher and editor in chief of Penthouse.
Gore Vidal’s Caligula, as it was originally titled before the author had his name removed in exchange for giving up his profit points, delivered what Southern’s Blue Movie novel had envisioned almost a decade earlier: graphic sex in a big-budget X-rated movie featuring major stars. With one caveat: Caligula’s famous cast—Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, and Helen Mirren—left the full-penetration and ejaculation shots to anonymous extras. But it was porn nonetheless and very expensive and a total embarrassment, and the perception that graphic sex and art could successfully coexist at the movies was given its burial.
Larry Kramer and William Friedkin were other major figures from the Sexplosion years who returned to challenge the sexual status quo only to do battle with another foe. Political correctness had been born of the feminist and black civil rights movements of the late 1960s, and as Kramer and Friedkin were to learn when it came to homosexual subject matter, there was probably a reason that Malcolm X never wrote a book called Niggers or Gloria Steinem never wrote one called Cunts.
In 1978, Kramer wrote Faggots, a novel about homosexual promiscuity. It caused such consternation in the gay community that the Oscar Wilde Book Store in Greenwich Village refused to stock the novel. “The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor. People would literally turn their back when I walked by,” recalled Kramer.
After directing the Boys in the Band movie, Friedkin returned to the Greenwich Village scene in the late 1970s to shoot Cruising, in which Al Pacino played an undercover cop investigating murders in the world of gay S&M. Activists protested and Vincent Canby in the New York Times agreed with them, calling the film a “homosexual nightmare.” Suddenly, the old Production Code didn’t look so bad to certain niche audiences: No-depiction of homosexuals had to be better than this depiction of homosexuals.
Kramer more than redeemed himself in the following decade with The Normal Heart, a play about the onset of AIDS that advocated, among other things, that gays stop having sex and start watch
ing porn on that new medium: video. Ronald Reagan may never have gotten around to “cleaning up the mess in Berkeley” when he was governor of California, but as president of the United States he did see that the federal government in the 1980s stayed away from AIDS research and that foreigners with the HIV virus were prevented from entering the country. Weeks after Rock Hudson died from AIDS in 1987, the long-running gay-themed musical La Cage aux Folles suddenly closed on Broadway; and even heterosexual themed material was not immune. In that year’s James Bond installment, License to Kill, the spy suddenly had to make do with just one female sex partner.
The “porno chic” of the early 1970s, once trumpeted on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, had devolved into Linda Boreman of Deep Throat writing no fewer than two antipornography exposés in the 1980s, Ordeal and Out of Bondage, which featured a foreword by Gloria Steinem.
No taboo was more firmly reestablished at this time than sex with a minor. While Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 screen version of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita had achieved classic status, critics lambasted (and audiences avoided) Edward Albee’s 1981 stage adaptation and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 screen adaption of Lolita, due in part to the subject matter of an adult man having sex with a twelve-year-old girl.
In 1981, nearly a decade after the release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the Adelaide Film Festival banned Melvin Van Peebles’s breakthrough film when South Australia’s attorney general, Trevor Griffin, objected to “the first four minutes of the film [in which] there is an explicit sequence of a young Negro boy in a position of gross indecency with a Negro woman. I don’t think I’d spend my time going to watch it.” And even more significant, when Mario Van Peebles wrote, directed, and produced Baadasssss!, his 2003 movie about the making of his father’s Sweet Sweetback Baadasssss Song, the one scene he did not faithfully re-create was his own deflowering at age thirteen in the arms of a prostitute. Graphic sex with a minor proved too controversial even for the director of a movie called Baadasssss!
Pornography didn’t go underground; it instead entered the front door of millions of homes with the advent of video technology that greatly expanded its reach. Taken off theater marquees and newsstands, it no longer stirred much controversy or heated debate, even among archfeminists who had bought Ordeal and Out of Bondage. For her part, Linda Boreman returned to the world she knew best, and using her old nom de porn Linda Lovelace, she posed for a pictorial in the soft-core Leg Show magazine. Porn wasn’t chic. It was now ordinary and everywhere.
Around the turn of the millennium, after an exhaustive search of British film vaults, British critic Mark Kermode found the “Rape of Christ” sequence, as well as other scenes cut from The Devils. His discovery led to the making of Paul Joyce’s documentary Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of Ken Russell’s The Devils, narrated by Kermode and released in 2004. It spurred screenings of the uncut version of The Devils at film festivals throughout the world, and the film is oft cited as Russell’s very best. It is also a reminder of what groundbreaking work the major Hollywood studios once produced on a regular basis in the Sexplosion years—and how diminished that output has been since then.
Warner Bros. had long abandoned producing any film like The Devils—or, for that matter, The Damned, Death in Venice, or Performance—and instead concentrated on mega-profit-making franchises like the Batman and Harry Potter movies. United Artists, home of Midnight Cowboy, Women in Love, Sunday Bloody Sunday, and Last Tango in Paris, languished as a major force in Hollywood, and was eventually bought by Tom Cruise to make his Nazi action picture Valkyrie, released in 2008. Sex-themed movies—movies like David Cronenberg’s Crash, about car accident fetishists; or Todd Field’s Little Children, about suburban infidelity; or Brokeback Mountain, about gay cowboy lovers; or Shame, about sex addiction—were left to the small independent studios. These films sometimes played to more limited or niche audiences, but the stories were told and often without compromise. The impact on the culture has been undeniable.
Where President Richard Nixon once fulminated in the Oval Office over the appearance of a gay character in All in the Family, President Barack Obama embraced “out” TV star Jesse Tyler Ferguson at a reelection fund-raiser in West Hollywood, and complimented him on his portrayal of a homosexual father on Modern Family. “Michelle and my daughters love that show,” gushed the president of the United States.
The first lady also waded into formerly forbidden territory when she commented on E. L. James’s S&M-themed bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey. While Michelle Obama admitted to not having read the novel, she did give it her tacit approval, noting, “But it’s obviously tacked into something, and giving people permission to explore parts of themselves that maybe felt a bit taboo.”
Even before the Obamas took up residence in the White House, the New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal had been dead a couple of years, not that his gay-baiting ended with his death at age eighty-four. His tombstone in Westchester Hills, New York, carries the epitaph “He kept the paper straight.” Otherwise, his legacy did not live on at the Times, which employed several openly gay staffers, including its chief theater critic. Ben Brantley has presided over a wildly more liberal, if marginalized, Broadway than in Rosenthal’s era. Where the Hair creators James Rado and Gerome Ragni chose to hide their romance during the musical’s long run, gay and lesbian couples were now married on the stage of the musical’s revival at the St. James Theatre shortly after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York State.
Four decades after its first unveiling, the big nude scene in Hair looked quaint in its stasis and shadows, and naked actors were no longer easy roadkill for judges, politicians, or other censors. Back in the Sexplosion years, those bluenose decisions sometimes came from notables who were otherwise liberal: In 1973, Nicolas Roeg followed his Performance directorial debut with Don’t Look Now, a film that Warren Beatty personally took upon himself to censor when he complained to executives at Paramount that “you can see her pussy.” The anatomy in question belonged to Beatty’s ex-girlfriend Julie Christie, who’d apparently gotten carried away in her big love scene with Donald Sutherland, whom Beatty saw as a rival, albeit in retrospect. Regarding deep frontal nudity, nearly two decades passed until Sharon Stone’s self-proclaimed “leg-crossing” scene in Basic Instinct made the journeyman actress, at age thirty-two, a star. Since then, incensed outrage over nudity has been replaced by mild amusement. At the 2012 Golden Globes, George Clooney joked from the podium about the size of Michael Fassbender’s oft-exposed penis in Shame. And when Helen Hunt played a sex surrogate, a role that required her to be totally naked for most of her screen time in The Sessions, she commented about reporters’ overuse of the word “brave” to describe her performance. “ ‘Brave’ is ‘naked,’ right?” she quipped, and went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for her effort.
Today, full frontal nudity is more common on cable TV than cigarette smoking is in office buildings, and the MPAA has tolerated one “fuck” per PG movie since the 1990s.
Even Lance Loud ultimately proved victorious over the reactionaries who once condemned him in Newsweek, the New York Times, and elsewhere. A decade after his death at age fifty, HBO aired the film Cinema Verite, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of An American Family. Of all the Andy Warhol superstars, only Edie Sedgwick achieved what Lance Loud did. Someone had cared enough to make a movie about him.
Photographic Section
Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol smile for a portrait in the 1960s, before she demanded to be removed from Chelsea Girls (1967).
Photofest
Chelsea Girls, despite its title, features a number of male performers in various intimate situations.
Photofest
To promote his novel Myra Breckinridge (1968), Gore Vidal revisits the Sunset Strip statue of a Vegas showgirl that inspired his transsexual character.
Everett Collection
Mart Crowley greets his actress friends Diana Lynn
and Natalie Wood, who were early supporters of The Boys in the Band (1968).
Photofest
Reuben Greene, Cliff Gorman, and Kenneth Nelson risked their careers to play homosexuals in the original staging of The Boys in the Band.
Photofest
Gerome Ragni portrays draft dodger Berger in the Broadway production of Hair (1968), which he coauthored with boyfriend James Rado.
Photofest
John Updike writes Couples (1968) and scores a Time magazine cover that proclaims “The Adulterous Society.”
Photofest
Jane Fonda brings a weightless striptease and much sex to outer space in Barbarella (1968).
Photofest
Terry Southern’s Candy is finally a movie (1968)—and a very bad one—starring Marlon Brando and Ewa Aulin in the title role.
Photofest
At Malcolm McDowell’s suggestion, he and Christine Noonan get naked to roll around on a greasy-spoon floor in If . . . (1968).
Photofest
Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling read a magazine while Joe Dallesandro receives attention from Geraldine Smith in Flesh (1968).Photofest
Susannah York, Beryl Reid, and Coral Browne visit a lesbian bar in The Killing of Sister George (1968); the scene does not appear in the original 1964 play.
Photofest
Elliott Gould, Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, and Dyan Cannon get in bed together, but decide against an orgy, in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).
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