"Does Your Husband Know You're Bisexual?"

A film is being shown. In it, an angry man fires out titles from a pornography library. The man's face is round, lumpy at the edges, with wild black hair like curled horns and skin peeled white by the fumes and sulphurs of New York. In a black turtleneck, against a black background, he looks like one of the reckless, seedy, whoring, half-learned, hung-over monks of the Middle Ages, methodically blashpeming after a tavern keeper has beaten him up. . . .

The Monster Cock; Why Not Eat Cunt?; They Fuck, We Fuck, I Fuck; The First Prick in Her Love-Box; She Put a Time Meter in Her Snatch; Fifty Million Frenchmen Suck Cunt; The Cock Gobbler. . . .

In the big room beneath the screen is an audience of pilgrims, professional people, mostly, lounging on hundreds of huge black and purple and yellow and orange and green and ocher pillows ($25 each from San Francisco), come to see if what they've heard is true--that the old rugged cross has been stashed with the collarbones of antique saints and the orgasm is the blessed symbol now. . . .

Twat's My Line; Where There's a Will There's a Lay; The Hump and Suck Club; A Philadelphia Lawyer Splits a Cunt's Hair; The Mod Mod Cocksucker; Famous Historical Fuckers. . . .

In corners of the room, awkward and stark, tall in their chairs and rigid-moving like machines, are people with a fiercer purpose. These are genuine pilgrims--palsied people, quadriplegic "wheelers" in their chairs, "Cadillac wheelers" in motorized chairs, people with no feeling below the waist, people with no feeling below the neck--come to see if what they've heard is true--that a magic seminar can give them back their sex. . . .

She Sucked My Prick in Lover's Lane; Artful European Suck-offs; The Fucking Fucking Fucking Service Club, Inc. . . .

Onscreen, the blaspheming monk is accelerating toward his close. He stops, gulps air and hurtles on again. His face grows larger and larger. Delight mixes with the fury in his voice. Grins break through his hostile gaze. Somehow, in some way, he is winning. . . .

The Art of Fucking; The Art of Asshole Screwing; The Art of First Fucking; The Art of Cunt Lapping; The Art of Finger Fucking; The Art of Cock Sucking; I Want More Fucking Fucking Fucking Fucking Fucking Girls.

The film is relaxing something in the people. Most are suspicious, tight, apprehensive; their taboo systems, their value patterns--their central arrangements of themselves--are getting bashed around and a lot of them are mad. The movie is pulling up a little of the anger in the air, condensing it, letting it drift away.

"We have to be lightning rods for hostility," says Ted Cole, a doctor and member of the staff. "It's a wearing role and it's hard to learn."

• • •

"We would like to extend to you an invitation to attend a two-day Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) seminar" begins the form letter from the Program in Human Sexuality. "This seminar, initially developed for medical students, has been expanded to include members of the professions, community representatives and other interested persons. Evaluation of previous seminars indicates that it is beneficial to attend with your spouse, fiancé or a significant other person with whom you would like to share your experience. We strongly encourage this inclusion."

"Warning!" begins an article by a medical school staff writer. "If you are embarrassed or offended by utter and complete sexual frankness, the Program in Human Sexuality of the University of Minnesota Medical School is probably just what the doctor ordered."

Standing before the people in the big room is Cole's wife, Sandy--tall, auburn-haired, with muted, profoundly ladylike voice and movements. While an aurora borealis of a light show swirls behind her, she is asking, "Why don't we list the words for some common human actions? Let's begin with masturbation."

A half-swallowed voice mumbles, "Jacking off."

Sandy smiles a pleased-teacher smile. "Jacking off. That's good." Her hand reaches out, sweeping the audience. "How about some more?"

" 'Beating the meat'?" she says. "Good . . . 'Flogging the bishop' . . . really? . . . 'Polishing the cane'?" (Here she gives an involuntary sweet laugh.) "What's that?" She leans forward, listening to a middle-aged man near the front. "Here's someone who says 'Racing for Beverly,' but he thinks it might be special to the gang he grew up with."

People laugh, are shouting out words eagerly now. As they shout, someone in the control booth writes the terms with a grease pencil, projecting them against the light show on the wall.

"Hey, those are all men's terms!" comes a strong female voice from the cushions.

She is seconded by a male. "What about some women's terms for beating off?"

But there don't seem to be any women's terms for beating off. This will puzzle the reporter throughout the SAR, for in the small-group sessions, he will find that women's masturbatory enterprises make Portnoy's seem like those of a tubercular castrato.

Sandy Cole has been calling up the words for elimination, for menstruation, for oral-genital sex, for intercourse--and the wall behind her has become the rainbow as it would be decorated by eighth-graders with the technology and guts. . . . Turning, whirling, standing out from the colors are "muff diving," "piss," "pee," "whizz," "flying Baker," "blow job," "shit," "crap," "number two," "eating cock," "falling off the roof," "hair pie," "clam sandwich," "taking a dump," "tube steak," "riding the rag," "dipping the tallywinkle," "pie at the Y," "sucking cunt" and one poor lonely "coitus."

"When the SARs began," says Ted (he pronounces SAR as it's pronounced in Porgy and Bess--"Boy!" "Yas--SAR!"), "all the leaders were men. Then we decided people would be more comfortable with some women. Without any idea of what I was letting her in for, I signed up Sandy. I needed a female body and hers was available--she came right out of the kitchen to lead a SAR. I thought I'd say, 'Do this,' 'Say that,' 'Bring those'--but she said,' 'I'm not a dog, I'm a person. You can't order me around like that.' Now she manages the whole two days--senses when one film should be substituted for another, senses whether we have to spend a lot of time reassuring people or we can move ahead; she keeps everything on schedule--and she handles the people who can't take certain movies, the ones who walk out of small groups, the ones who show up in the lobby looking dazed. Until we began working on this program together, I didn't know the woman I'd married."

Sandy is delicate-boned and slim and must approach six feet in her platform shoes. As the reporter lies on a bright pillow watching her, a phrase begins circling in his mind--"lily maid of Astolat"--and he's added a second ancient figure to this strange pageant, not even a solid figure like the monk but one etherealized out of some literary Victorian's repression and denial. With her auburn hair piled in a bun, then sweeping down behind the cheekbones of her creamy, long, perfect Anglo-Saxon face, Sandy Cole detoxifies everything she is summoning up on the wall; she is obviously a woman who is happy encouraging others to do what they must but who has no need to do any of those things herself. She is a woman who could never fart.

"Sandy provides the permission and the warmth," says Ted. "I provide the authority and the white coat." A mournful, hesitant quality softens his voice. "People don't seem to relax with me the way they do with her. We have a little sherry party at the end of this first day. Sandy spends it surrounded by people; I spend it wandering around, trying to get someone to talk to me. And several times when I've actually gotten into a conversation with a woman, the husband has come around and dragged her off."

Cole has an odd resemblance to Dr. William Masters, co-author of Human Sexual Response and an abrupt, unsocial advocate of touching and affection as essentials of satisfactory sex. Cole has the same fit square build as Masters, the same bald head, the same direct aggressive manner, even the same skewed focus in one eye, which dampens the toughness of his gaze (or increases his power and mystery, depending on his relationship to you and the bounce of your ego at the time). Also like Masters, he has a background in conventional medicine--first as an internist and now as a professor of rehabilitation medicine.

The bright room lights come on. People blink, turn their attention from the wall to Sandy, who says, "Now we'll go into something I suppose is familiar to everyone in this room--masturbating." She pulls out a folder. "First you might like to hear what the medical community thought of masturbation within the lifetimes of many doctors still practicing. Here's an excerpt from Health and Longevity, subtitled 'Absolute Authority on Every Subject'--which might indicate how much the medical mind has changed in the 65 years since it was written." (There is laughter--ironic, abrupt, resentful--from the nurses, the psychologists, the social workers in the room. This resentment toward the regal position of the doctor, toward his implication that he is an error-free machine, toward his management-vs.-labor outlook, toward his incredible income, is a constant undertow at the SAR.)

An expression that could contain an alloy of malice slips across Sandy's face at the audience's laugh and vanishes. (Later, when she is hustling around, checking with the caterer, getting handouts delivered, trying to shepherd people to the right places, worrying that the program is running too long, she will say, "People--especially doctors--keep coming up and wanting to know what my credentials are. When they find I don't have an M.D. or an M.S. or a Ph.D., they stop taking me seriously. 'Just a housewife,' they think. They don't care about my competencies, just my certificates.")

From the book on masturbation, Sandy begins to read: " 'Onanism or Self-Pollution: Beyond everything, [it] is a crime against nature, punishable by consequences that are simply appalling. [The youth] falls into a distaste for everything except the opportunity of indulgence. . . the secretion of the reproductive liquid . . . withdraws a very precious portion of the blood. The muscles . . . become soft; his body becomes bent; his gait is sluggish and he is scarcely able to support himself. The wretched being finishes by shunning the face of men and dreading the observation of women.'

"For girls," says Sandy, "the prognosis is worse: 'ulcerations of the vulvouterine canal, abortions, and sometimes nymphomania and furor uterinus, terminate life amidst delirium and convulsions.' "

The audience laughs, but with a touch of uneasiness. The Mayo Clinic was (continued on page 152)"Does Your Husband Know?"(continued from page 146) already a huge business when this book was written; surgeons such as William Halsted and Harvey Cushing were developing the core of modern surgical technique. What crazy superstitions, wonder many in the audience, are they--today--promoting as scientific fact?

"He forgot the hair on the palms!" calls someone from the cushions; the laughter becomes easier, and Sandy introduces some movies about masturbation.

"These are personal statements by the people in them," she says.

Beside each other, on a split screen, are two naked women. Both would probably be attractive in person, but in a medium that casts Cloris Leachman as homely, these women are not beauties. One has a kind, round, earnest face and a body that is more than plump. The other has a lean, expressive face whose bone structure and constantly drawn-back lips are suggestive of a coyote's; her body is on the scrawny side of thin.

The round woman gets out of a bathtub, reclines on some pillows, props a mirror between her legs and--with measured dignity appropriate to a featured soloist--begins masturbating. Her hand massages, plucks, flutters, squeezes; she stops to adjust the mirror, then resumes; even at orgasm she retains a benign and slightly formal smile.

The lean woman's face is contorted as her segment begins; she is taking a shower and apparently this is about to make her come. (This woman appears again in a movie about "pleasuring" and intercourse; in neither film is she ever not about to come.) The reporter reflects that it would be pleasant to go about perpetually on the edge of orgasm but wonders if it wouldn't give a certain Alfred E. Neuman "What--me worry?" sameness to one's life.

The men who masturbate are a teenager and a dancer. And here the sound track shows a curious sex-role bias. The women masturbated to Son of Mantovani soft rock, full of violins and guitars. The men masturbate to a hard-whacking beat from Tommy, heavy with the slap of drums.

The teenager looks like any big kid pumping his dork on a dull Saturday. He is reading a book titled Graduation Night and he meticulously catches the jism with what most teenage boys will recognize as a wiping rag from a gas station. His expression is what the reporter remembers his own was at such times--abstracted and slack, with some mild grimacing near the end. The most interesting aspect of the film comes from Sandy: "The teenager made it himself, for a high school senior project. I always wonder what grade it got."

On the split screen beside the teenager, the dancer prances and struts, flings himself onto a bed, massages his cock like a curator shining a dinosaur bone. He is a tiny thin man and so immensely pleased with his penis, his body, his sensations that there would be no surprise in seeing Dr. Seusslike subtitles drift across the screen: "Halloo! I am I! I am me! I'm the best that there is! I'm the Best that could be!" When he begins to come, he thrashes about like a man battering his way out of the center of a haystack. He finishes with his head under a pillow but jumps up promptly and struts to a table, where he salutes the camera crew and swigs a glass of wine. His self-satisfaction is enormous, as if he had just banged a whole chapter of the Junior League.

Again the lights in the big room come on. "We'll break now for our small-group meetings," says Sandy. "Small groups one and two will meet in the rooms to my left; three and four will meet in. . . ." There are eight groups, each with about ten members.

People stir uneasily on their pillows, stand hesitantly--then hurry off to form long slow lines at the toilets, come back to crowd into slower lines at the coffee machines. They and their Significant Others stand close together, touch, cling to each other's clothing--like children about to be abandoned to the first day of kindergarten. (Significant Others and the people they come with are always assigned to different groups.)

Aggregating their experiences, the professionals have gone through the first hour alone with a paranoid schizophrenic, managed the first operation in which a patient began to die, have had the first confrontation with a gang of angry relatives in the hall. . . . And, with all this experience, they are unhappy about crowding into a small room to talk with strangers about sex.

Eventually, all reasonable delays have been used up, the doors to the small rooms have been closed and small-group leaders are asking people to introduce themselves and tell what they expect to get from the SAR.

Those who treat patients or meet clients or advise parishioners know what they're supposed to get from the SAR: They're supposed to get so used to sex that they can discuss oral-genital coupling and anal intercourse as easily as they can discuss the side effects of tranquilizers or the efficacy of prayer. As Cole told the large group, "One of the sex-education pioneers likes to say that a doctor suspecting a sex problem will often ask, 'How's your sexual life?' and stop there. Can you imagine a doctor suspecting kidney disease, then stopping with, 'How's your urinary life?' " One of the course readings advises, "Anything that can even be mistaken for a wince or a looking away can stop your patient in his tracks and exacerbate his problems."

The Significant Others (originally "spouses and fiancés," titles that did not fit the homosexual partners, the fathers and mothers, the same-sex/other-sex living companions of people who attend) are less sure why they're there. In the reporter's group is Cynthia--tall, severe-looking, in her mid-20s, with sand-colored hair snatched up so tight on top of her head she seems coifed by a power lathe.

Even before the door is closed, Cynthia has precipitated the first group interaction; she has announced in a small and hostile voice that her husband has made her come to the SAR, that she is tense and when she is tense she has to smoke. If tension had compelled her to massage her clitoris or even the nearest cock, the group leaders and many group members would surely have extended warm support. But smoking!

The group leaders--a sad-faced, wise-looking quadriplegic named Jonas and a squarish, plain, cheerful woman named Joan--ask the others, "How about it?"

"This is an awfully small room," says a woman.

"Do you really smoke?"

"You can kill yourself, if that's your bag, Cynthia, but we shouldn't have to take your trip."

"I can't stay if you smoke. I'm allergic."

Jonas and Joan help work a compromise. Cynthia will sit by the door and when her urge to smoke becomes over-powering, she will act out her perversion in the hall. After Jonas has moved to clear her place--his motorized wheel-chair clicking and whirring and tacking like a ship moving sideways without tugs--the introductions begin.

There is Lester, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Omaha. Tall and big-boned, he gives the impression of having been stuffed with unhappy secrets until he is as soft and ponderous as a man made of leaf sacks. He has an inordinate capacity to just sit, with nothing moving anywhere--except his pale flat lips. "I came here with negative expectations," he says. "I think that this program and programs like it are helping to accelerate a tragedy in American life--the separation of sex from emotion. And without emotion, sex is just one more semiskilled amusement, like motorcycle riding." His voice is colorless but strong; even its flatness (it is as flat as a Nebraska prairie) lends it strength.

"That's good that you're so open," says Jonas. "I hope the rest of us can be as open as the SAR goes on."

Next to Lester is Judy. Out of God's molds, she has obviously come from the one marked Stereotype A2: Librarian. Around 40, she would not be remembered 15 minutes after being introduced at a party. Her bland face (with plastic-rimmed glasses she might have bought in high school) has the patient, inquisitive look of nearsightedness. She is wearing a shirt dress of some brownish shade--the uniform of the nonpretty woman.

But her voice is surprisingly confident and warm, without any "Hush, can't you read the instructions?" quality about it. "I'm an S.O.," she says (short for Significant Other). "My husband's a doctor who has some disabled patients--but that's only one reason we came. We think we have a very sexual marriage, and we came as a kind of test, to see if we really are loving and comfortable and free, to make sure we're not missing something we don't know we're missing."

She turns slightly. "Lester, I think you're right about emotionless sex. But I think you've got to ask, 'Which emotions?' Looking back, I can remember all kinds of emotions that seemed part of sex but really weren't--anger, guilt, fear, some revulsion. . . . Maybe things like this SAR help clear away those junk emotions and leave room for the ones that count."

Actually, Judy is a noticeable woman; one has to focus on her, that's all. She is tan and has a taut, lovely body with the healthy aura that bicycling or tennis, plus lots of screwing, maintains. It occurs to the reporter that the bones and planes of her face probably would have made her look like a 40-year-old librarian when she was 24 and that--at 24--she surely would not have looked so cared for or content. She is an awkward caring, being polished toward beauty.

Lester gives the noncommittal psychoanalytic "Hmmmm," which could mean anything from "That's a profound insight" to "Fuck you."

Jonas and Joan exchange glances. To look toward her, Jonas must turn a few degrees in his chair. His head goes around easily at first, then stops as the awkward waterlogged weight of his body brakes it. He dips his head and gives a tug of his upper shoulders--his one expressive gesture. Joan smiles at him. She has a broad, homely, mischievous Steppes of Central Asia face. No, there's something more powerful than mischief behind her face--and something so tender and aware that "homeliness" fits only at the first rough glance. In her face is sexuality--sophisticated, a bit self-mocking, but as inescapable and direct as thirst. Certain women with such Slavic faces--certain women born to reshelve books in libraries--what spell touches them near middle age, wonders the reporter, that makes them pop out like lilacs--fragrant and tough and brilliant--while the ex-cheerleaders, the home-coming queen sour into Weight Watchers and six daily hours of TV?

"I think this is going to be a fine group," says Joan, and Jonas gives his loose snubbed nod:

"We're going to be all right!" He has a heavy-boned masculine face, with curly dark hair and a short beard the texture of steel wool. As he smiles, his brooding air gives way to radiance. In his smashed nervous system is a great quantity of life.

There is John, fastened into a dark suit, vest, striped tie and spit-shined black shoes. He is a little overweight, a little gray, but is the sort of handsome, rugged-looking man one always assumes played football somewhere along the line. "I'm vice-president of a bank," he says, "so I'm always selling, always talking with people." He pauses. "But I'm not used to talking about things like this. . . ." He finishes rapidly. "I'm here because my wife teaches sex education--the 'sex lady of Merrit School' they call her--and she wanted me to come. I don't have any expectations. I'm just waiting to see what in hell comes next."

There is the reporter, who gives two genuine reasons for being there. "I teach in a college where there are a lot of disabled students, and I'm uncomfortable with them. Also, I teach a mass-communications course where I talk a lot about pornography and pornography legislation. Lecturing about pornography to people 20 years younger than I am makes me feel like a dirty old man. I hope the SAR will make me more comfortable at work."

There is Annie. She is small-boned, dark-eyed, pale-skinned, with slightly pointed ears and nose. Her striped pants suit, light make-up and short hair are meticulously neat. She makes frequent, unself-conscious grooming motions like a cat. "I'm a nurse," she says, "and I work in a kidney-dialysis unit. Patients keep asking me, 'Will I be impotent?' 'Am I going to lose my desire for my husband?' 'How soon will my wife start looking for someone with a stiff cock?' And they ask the big question that I can't answer--'Is life worth living without sex?' We have no social workers, no psychologists, no psychiatrists, no counselors at all for people on dialysis. We plug them in until their money runs out, and then we send them out to die." She touches her hair with a little flick of neatness. "In the ward, we sometimes talk about the only time the whole dirty system might be nice--if we could see Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon and John Mitchell and all those horrible, money-focused Republicans needing dialysis and running out of cash. I think we'd fight to see who'd shut down their machines."

Jonas says, quickly, "I don't think we'd better get into politics here. Sex is usually upsetting enough. And you said something heavy about sex. You said patients asked if people can get along without it. Do you think they can?"

"I'm not married," says Annie. "And I've gotten along without sex for six months at a time." She gives a throaty, vital laugh that has no connection with her appearance. "But it seems to be either feast or famine when you're not married--and I love those feasts."

There is Eric, a wiry, quick-moving general practitioner. "Last year I went to a surgical refresher course because it was recommended. The year before. I went to a course in emergency medicine because it was recommended. Now I'm here because it was recommended. But I'm like John; I don't know what to expect. And, like Lester, I don't think I approve. I didn't expect all this conversation; I expected data, statistics, hints on treatment--and instead I'm getting life histories out of a sociology text."

There is Frank, a prison psychologist. He is lean, with a whisper-quiet voice. He has listened impassively, but when he smiles, he puts across the quality that Jack Palance, playing a whisper-voiced satanic gun fighter, put across in Shane--a quality that makes the reporter check the distance to the door. "They gave me per diem and told me to come. But they should have sent a few lifers instead. Those are the guys who need some movies about crotch."

And, again, there is Cynthia with the thin plain face and yanked-up hair--back from a cigarette in the hall. "Actually, I've got more reason to be here than I admitted," she says. "I teach in a school for disturbed adolescents--but sometimes I think I'm as disturbed as they are. I've never had an orgasm. And even though I love my husband and we have really pleasant, warm times together, I get an awful feeling--somewhere between deadness and a cringe--when he touches me in bed." She pulls out a cigarette pack, puts it back. "Those masturbation movies--you can't imagine how I envied those women those long, long climaxes."

"I don't think I'd choose those women to envy," says Lester, the immobile psychoanalyst. "If a woman carefully sets the stage, then calls in Candid Camera while she brings herself to orgasm, I'd say she was a candidate for psychotherapy."

"Wouldn't you call me a candidate for psychotherapy?" asks Cynthia.

"Yes," says Lester, "on the basis of your frigidity and discomfort, I'd call you one, too."

Irritation crosses Jonas' face. "We've got a kind of contract in this seminar," he says. "We're as open as we can bring ourselves to be, but we don't diagnose and we don't do therapy. Other branches of the Human Sexuality Program do these things. . . ." He gives his cramped half-twist, takes in the rest of the group. "Did anybody else have any strong feelings about the masturbation movies?"

"I didn't see what the grownups looked so pleased about," says John, the dark-suited banker. "I think of masturbation as something for kids."

(continued on page 250)"Does Your Husband Know?"(continued from page 154)

"Yeah," says the reporter. "You work up to this 'Pop!' and then there's no after-screw talking, no breast stroking or fanny patting, not even any chance to say 'Wow!' Masturbation is lonely."

"Lots of men have left me lonely," says Annie, the dialysis nurse.

Judy turns her librarian's face to Cynthia, who doesn't like her husband to touch her. "Did you ever try to masturbate to orgasm?"

"My husband bought me a vibrator. It was a joke--but he sort of meant it, too. I got it out and turned it on once. But I felt silly and put it back in the box. Once, when I was tight. I used it to stir pancake batter."

"How many of the women here do masturbate?" asks Joan, the group leader.

"In times of famine," says Annie, "or when I'm dating a poor lover." She grooms, gives her startling throaty laugh. "Or sometimes when I'm just hot, like I'll probably be tonight." Annie has no S.O. along.

"I can masturbate by crossing my legs and squeezing," says Judy. "I said. 'Watch,' to my husband and did it in the landing pattern when we came in on the plane last night."

"Can't people tell?" asks John.

"My face gets tense and I breathe hard, but that happens to a lot of people in a landing pattern."

"The only grown males I know who masturbate are prisoners," says Frank, the prison psychologist. "Especially in solitary--to keep from going crazy. They flog it until it swells like a sausage and sometimes bleeds. But once they get out of their 20s, they complain they can't come more than a couple of times a day. In fact, that's one of my own complaints. My wife and I used to be good for four times now and then."

"That's a complaint you wouldn't hear in a women's prison," says Annie. "Sometimes I think I could come like those women in the movies and keep it up all day--then take on some men that night."

"My husband gets wildly jealous," says Judy. "He says God wasn't concentrating when He made men and bees--they both put it in once and they're dead."

"I don't think it's fair, either," says John. "It's like the difference between one Roman candle and an evening with the Hong Kong Fireworks Company."

A rap on the door signals that it is time for a large-group session.

"Not many groups get moving like this one," says Jonas. "Usually we spend half a day defining terms and moralizing and talking about what we've read. Then somebody blurts out something honest and we finally get under way. I feel that this group started out under way."

The reporter feels an odd pride, an in-group vanity, at this summation. Looking around, he sees the same self-satisfied glow, the same sense of comradeship on the faces of almost everyone else. Only Lester, the psychoanalyst, and Eric, the general practitioner, look removed. Eric, in fact, has hunched himself into a corner and is scowling.

Before the large group is a minister who reminds the reporter of the Coast Guard officers he has seen in small towns on the Great Lakes. The minister is lean, brown, weathered, erect. He has no looseness in his bearing, no invitation to small talk on his face. He also has a quality of having seen more than most people--and of having watched carefully what he's seen. He is Starbuck, saved from the Pequod and determined not to take shit from any Ahab ever again.

The minister gives a talk that seems casual and unrehearsed--but that is as intricately organized as a good whodunit. He talks about nature's reveling in diversity but society's condemning it. He proposes a homosexuality scale--from zero to six in homosexual desire, from zero to six in homosexual activity. He has a zero-zero brother, he says, a rare person--for most people go into the ones and twos and threes in activity and occasionally peak into the fives and sixes in desire. He reiterates society's punitiveness against homosexuals, describes how the homosexual has found himself (or herself) in his (or her) state of desire and is powerless to change it. He dismisses some common beliefs about homosexuals--that they're necessarily effeminate (or, for women, built like shot-putters), that they're necessarily artistic, that they're child molesters. . . . And then he begins an anecdote--casual, offhand--about the unusualness of being a sex counselor. "I was sitting in a bar between planes," he says, "and I got into one of those "What do you do?' conversations with a businessman beside me. When I told him I was a counselor on homosexuality, he said, 'You can have those queers. If one sat next to me, I'd have to get up and leave, or else I'd punch him.' I think what happened next was one of my finest moments. I said, 'I don't know what you're going to do, but I ordered this drink and I'm going to sit right here and drink it.' He ended up by buying me another drink."

The suddenness, the unexpectedness of the minister's declaration of his own homosexuality freezes the audience for a moment. The minister goes on. "Nobody really knows what makes a homosexual. I have no idea why I went my way and my brother went his. But in our society, I think we have a fetish about understanding. 'To understand is to forgive'--that sort of thing. I don't think you have to understand something to accept it. I can't see, for the life of me, why a man and a woman would want to go to bed together. Obviously, they get pleasure out of it, but I can't get the vaguest emotional sense of what that pleasure is. Still, I've officiated at over 1000 weddings. If people want to be heterosexual, I'll do what I can to help them out.

"Incidentally," he adds, "there's absolutely no way to identify a homosexual unless he identifies himself. I wish there were; it'd save me a lot of time." He pauses. "On the other hand, I'm not sure it would do much good, at that. Getting professionally involved in sex doesn't leave much time for getting involved in it socially." He strides out like a ship's captain after a commander's call, while the audience follows him with enthusiasm and applause.

• • •

There is a film. An attractive couple is in the kitchen, cleaning up, horsing around, obviously enjoying the simple pleasure of being together. Their touches become more lingering and sexual. They kiss, a kiss that starts lightly, then becomes clinging and hot. They are unusually attractive, both in physical appearance and in a happy, affectionate charm. Holding hands, caressing, they head for the bedroom. They undress, helping each other with tenderness and love. They begin to pleasure each other. (It's pleasant, the SAR's revival of the old verb to pleasure, for the caressing, the touching, the tonguing that go with making love. It is a word both expressive and pure.) Scenes that are often offensive are not offensive in this film. A penis rises--a good sturdy mesomorphic penis--and a hand massages it. There are vigorous long kisses. A penis goes in and out of a mouth. And, finally, the goal that, second to money, must be the most sought-after goal in America--simultaneous orgasms.

The distinction of this movie, besides the genuine quality of the fun and affection the couple shows--and the film-making skill with which these qualities are put across--is that both lovers are males with football-player physiques.

Neither Joan nor Jonas has to call for responses in the next small group.

"I'd hate to think of equipment like those gay guys have never getting inside a woman," says Judy. "It's nice to think that maybe the men are bisexual."

"Do you really believe there's such a thing as a bisexual?" asks John. "Don't you think bisexuals are really queers putting on an 'I'm normal' act?' (This is a group member's first casual contradiction of the homosexual minister's talk. Today and tomorrow, Lester will sprinkle in comments about the greater aesthetic sensitivity of homosexuals, about how homosexuality is caused by weak or vicious fathers, all the clichés from the sophomore psych texts.)

Frank's barely audible words fill the small room like the cockling of a gun. "I don't think we should use the word queer. It's like nigger. I've seen men stabbed for using it."

John responds with executive rationality--plus an honest effort at good will, "I'll try to forget I know the word."

"Thanks," says Frank. Abruptly, his smile has no hint of prisons, hardness, danger, locks. "I used to call homosexuals queers and think I hated them. But you meet so many homosexuals in prison you forget all that queer/fag/punch-'em-in-the-nose stuff. The poor desperate bastards are just doing what they can with what they've got. The guys you've got to laugh along with are the ones who get sent up for being homosexuals. One told me, 'They didn't seem to have no idea they puttin' me in heaven, man. Good-lookin' boys, hot, experienced guys--all of 'em there for me! An' this cure shit! Didn't nobody want to cure me. I tell you how to cure me--put me in a women's prison. Lock me there till I'm so deprived them gals begin gettin' my cock up. After I come in about 20 girls, then I believe I wouldn't be pure gay no more. Of course, I'd fuss if they did that to me. "Cruel and unusual punishment!" I'd yell."'

Judy has looked indecisive during this interchange, has become nondescript for that brief time. Now her spark returns. "We have absolute confidentiality in this group?"

"That's our first rule," says Jonas.

"All right," says Judy to John. "You asked if I believe in bisexuals. I'm bisexual. For about five years. I've been having orgasms with both men and women. I think I've felt desire for women since my teens, but I'd just have a twinge--like beginning panic--whenever it started to come up."

"Does your husband know you're bisexual?" asks Joan.

"No. We had so many crises learning how to handle heterosexual affairs--learning to quit if it really got serious, learning not to rob each other of time or caring, I don't want to learn to handle new crises unless it just can't be avoided."

Frank smiles, the outlaw expression back. "Maybe he'd want a threesome. Lots of guys have told me that's the hottest sex there is."

"I have been thinking about it. I suppose some night at a party . . . three of us just talking on a bed . . . a few touches . . . and then, if it's natural, we'll go on."

Frank's smile has lost all its dangerous quality, become wondering and amused. "I know pimps, I've met their whores, I've listened to stories about what Johns have the girls do; but the pimps and whores figure it's work--better than canning chickens or assembling batteries, but not something you do if you don't get paid. Now, here's a . . . well . . . a. . . ."

Ironic and friendly, Judy helps him: "A plain-looking woman of the upper-middle class?"

"Well, yeah . . . doing all this wild stuff for fun. Are lots of women like you?"

Judy pauses, thinking. "People are so different," she says.

Annie cuts in. "For instance, I love oral-genital sex. To me, it's a big part of what you do in bed. But I lived half a year with a guy who yelled, 'My God!' and jumped out of bed the first time I went down on him. And later, when he'd begun to enjoy that, he got sick and had to run for the bathroom the first time he went down on me. Eventually, he went back to his wife, and the next time I saw him, he complained that sex with her was as interesting as sex with a cedar plank."

Adds John, "To listen to my wife, the sex lady, you'd think she's tried every kink that's been cataloged. But she's still a good WASP from the country club. She's as adept at twisting a little to keep your hands off or your head away as she was at Vassar."

"Something's bothering me," says Lester. "Behind your disappointment in your wife's at-home performance is a judgment I feel this whole program is pushing: If you don't enjoy things many people consider perversions, you're a prude. I wonder about the old Freudian idea of the mature personality expressing itself in genital sex and the immature personality expressing itself in oral-genital sex, in bisexuality, in things I'd call perversions."

(The reporter contacts an analytically oriented former chairman of the University of Minnesota Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Donald Hastings, about this. "Cultural mores seem to be changing rapidly" is Dr. Hastings' reply. "Sexual practices regarded as 'perverse' some decades ago would now be looked upon by most experts . . . simply as variations on the sexual theme which, if done by mutual consent, carry no automatic diagnosis of pathology, immaturity and the like. Indeed, I find a 'perversion' extremely difficult to define; about as close as I can come to it is the performance of a sexual act on another person without his consent and willingness. Rape would, I suppose, be a prototype here, or the sexual involvement of a young child. At the other end of the spectrum, I would be unable to diagnose a perversion if, for example, a married couple engaged in unusual sexual behavior by mutual consent. I would regard it as their own private business and would not infer that they needed psychiatric diagnosis or therapy.")

In the large group on sex roles, Sandy proposes a fantasy--that the world has become Amazonian, that women are the dominant sex:

"Recall that everything you have ever read . . . uses only female pronouns--she, her--meaning both girls and boys, both women and men. Recall that most of the voices on radio and most of the faces on TV are women's. Recall that you have no male Senator representing you in Washington. Feel into the fact that women are the leaders, the power centers, the prime movers. Man, whose natural role is husband and father, fulfills himself through nurturing children and making the home a refuge for women. . . ."

As she reads, the reporter feels an emotion begin and grow. By the start of the next small-group session, it bursts like glass against a wall. "I get tired of this 'Stop oppressing our sisters, make women equal!' shit. May wife and I got married because, in the Fifties, that was the only thing people who got along and were fucking did. Then it looked like she was going to be infertile, so we had to try for kids. We didn't have to try very hard. We've screwed four times without contraceptives or tied tubes and we've got three kids.

"While we were doing all this marrying and reproducing, I was trying to get through college and medical school. I wanted to end up a psychiatry professor--a sort of Robert Coles/Erich Fromm/Rollo May type. Except I flunked out of med school. All the tests showed I had enough brains for doctoring, so I figured it was partly that most students finished classes, ate supper, studied till midnight, then got up and studied awhile before classes began--while I went home to domestic conversations and diapers in the toilet and a wife who got depressed because we never went out."

Jonas asks, "What did you do after you flunked out?"

"I figured I could still be some sort of professor. I'd been selling occasional stories and articles to Esquire, Harper's--places like that. So I started on a Ph.D. in mass communications, my wife got some little part-time jobs, I sold a little more writing and we staggered along on three-four thousand a year--until we just got too poor to survive."

"And you quit school?" asks Jonas.

"I quit and got the only job my qualifications allowed--teaching journalism in a community college where 90 percent of the students read somewhere below the ninth-grade level and a question from a recent literature exam was 'Ogres are: A. always good, B. always bad, C. sometimes bad, D. none of the above'!"

Says Lester, "I'd say you don't feel very good about your job."

The reporter considers some dark comment about Lester's perceptivity but decides he's already pushing himself too hard upon the group. "About my job I feel hatred, humiliation, despair. . . . I've got a lot of feelings about my job."

Joan says, "Your face is so changed! Your eyes are glittering and your jaw is tight enough to snap the bones!"

Jonas shifts in his chair, a frequent movement that makes the reporter wonder if he's in pain. With a touch of surprise, the reporter realizes, "I care if he's in pain."

Jonas asks, "Are we still talking about sex roles?"

"I am," says the reporter. "I'm in the middle of a dull lifetime of earning dull pay checks my wife and kids turn over to dull corporations. I'm a dead-end white-collar man, and the next interesting words I'm likely to hear are, 'You're having a heart attack.' And on this plateau of the maybe-living dead, my wife, and the women in her consciousness-raising group, and the authoresses in Ms. magazine, and the speakers on the Sisterhood of Joanie Caucus circuit have decided it's all my fault, and their husbands' faults, and their fathers' faults that they're home with the Newlywed Game and dirty wash instead of out there out-slamming Billie Jean King or discovering the cure for birth defects.

"Now, in middle age, my wife has decided she wants to get out there, too. She wants to be a fund-raising executive. I think she'll make it. She's smart. She's intense about learning the skills and she's got the time to learn them. She's making important contacts and she's got the time to make them. She can organize. She can speak. She's got tremendous drive. I think she'll be great. And all I want to know is why i have to hold my humiliating job--teaching college students that sentences start with big letters and end with punctuation--while she learns a real career. Why did she have to wait until I was a trained, certified, permanent full-time nobody before she set out to be a somebody?"

"Is your college really that bad?" asks Annie. "I mean, it just couldn't be worse than nursing school."

The reporter gives one of his favorite lines. "Being hired to teach journalism at my college is like being hired to coach track in a paraplegic ward."

In the silence, the reporter remembers the soprano who sang Sherman's March to the Sea as an encore in Atlanta.

"You forgot I was in this chair, didn't you?" asks Jonas. On his face, which is coming into middle age and is worn by sorrows and efforts, is some deep emotion.

"I forgot," says the reporter, knowing there is no excuse.

Jonas' face lights with that surprising burst of smile. "Thanks man," he says. "Friends do that sometimes. I wish everybody would forget I'm in this chair." He shifts once more and asks, "If you could do it over--this education/job thing--how would you handle it?"

"I wouldn't get married until I was sure of getting through med school."

"Would you marry the same woman?"

"I would. Even more now than then."

"I'm glad, man--that's a good thing to hear." There is a soft musical rasp to Jonas' voice, a sound both tender and masculine. He has a quality as odd in our society as the qualities of those tribesmen who cannot comprehend clock time or who have little sense of property; he puts across a simple, direct concern for people.

There is silence for a while; everyone feels comfortable in it. Then Annie says, "I feel a lot of bitterness about sex roles, too. Nursing wasn't my idea, it was my father's. I wanted to go to college--but that wasn't 'practical'; I'd get too many 'useless ideas.' You know what I wanted to be? A physicist. I loved physics in high school and I did extra reading on it in nursing school. I suppose if I had a husband now, he'd be bitching, because I certainly wouldn't work one day more as a nurse than I had to, or because I'd want to go back to college." She turns her hands up in hopelessness and anger. "So I work in a dialysis unit and I see that nobody spends money to keep my people alive and human--that all of it goes to fat-cat doctors and fat-cat administrators, and we can't even afford counselors to teach my people how to die!"

"Wow," says Jonas softly. "Wow."

More silence. Then John says. "I know this is trivial after that, but we've only got a few minutes and I'm going to talk about myself. I wish my wife would quit work and have kids." He looks around, this mass-media male-model bank V.P. in a buttoned vest. "That's really why I'm here. I'm supposed to become sexually freed up or get out. My wife wants an open marriage, which means she wants to have 'relationships' with men, which means she wants to fuck some of them." He shakes his head. "And she's really so conventional--a missionary-position housewife. Her guys are going to be as disappointed as Munchkins trying to rape the Tin Woodman."

Joan interrupts, a touch of passion intensifying her words. "Do you ever fuck other women?"

John studies her a moment, then shrugs. "All right, I'll say it just the way you want to hear it. I get a little outside pussy now and then. Who doesn't?" His spirit sinks again. "Even if she'd do it now and then and hide it, I could probably take that. But this goddamn openness! And the enthusiasm she puts into that sex course she teaches! You'd think there wasn't any other subject in the world! And her hiking boots and blue jeans and scrapes and bracelets and silver rings and no make-up and denim shirts--and I haven't seen her wear underwear in three years." John is showing the masculine depression of an athlete at the end of a bad season. "You know, I really used to like it when she wore white gloves and we both got bored in art museums on Sunday afternoons."

"I often recommend the Bible to my patients," says Lester. "I wish your wife would glance at Ephesians 5:22."

• • •

As the reporter spots his wife among the people milling before the next large group, he sees that she has the middle-aged sexual electricity he'd noticed in Judy and Joan. She is a former gawky teenager with late breasts and a big nose, at last coming to realize that she is a graceful woman with a strong, proud face and people who admire her. He is pleased by his wife's rings and sandals and blue jeans and by the fact that the dog chewed up her last white gloves three years before. She comes across the room and hands him a cup of coffee. With her is an attractive blond man who cannot stop staring at the reporter. A few moments after it becomes embarrassing, the man does a kind of snap twist and vanishes into another group.

"He knows a lot about you," says the reporter's wife.

"It must be startling stuff."

"What could be startling around here? He knows that you're self-dramatizing, that you alternate between pride and self-deprecation, that you're great in bed--despite some failures with other ladies--that you're imaginative and obstinate and horrid-tempered and funny and tremendously interesting to live with. He knows that you hate your job and that I'm looking for work that'll free you to try for something better."

"Wow," thinks the reporter. He looks around the room, sees a dramatically auburn-haired woman in jeans and a serape beside John, the banker. "So there's the sex lady of Merrit School." He sees Judy, the steamy, bisexual, masturbating marvel of a natural-born librarian, and beside her a vigorous, distinguished-looking man who is probably her husband--the free and loving doctor who would surely be startled to learn the entire range of his wife's sexual enthusiasms. "I wonder how many people in their medical society know what I know," thinks the reporter. Over there is Cynthia, the severe-faced compulsive smoker with the skinned-cat hair style--and that must be her husband, the man she doesn't like touching her. All over the room, the reporter sees people sneaking glances, turning away, glancing back--staring at the actors in the real-life Ibsen and Albee and Chekhov they have been listening to all day.

• • •

The Fuckorama: The last media presentation of the day, built up to by hours of meticulously chosen smut. Most of the material is simple hard-core porn, the kind shown in basements to insurance men, bankers and assistant district attorneys; it is shown in five simultaneous projections on two walls: and everybody who knows the figures (as does the reporter) realizes there really are 15 movie projectors and slide carrousels and quadraphonic sound machinery behind that wide blank face of the projection booth. Shown all together, with music from rock to Gregorian, at the end of a day on which the reporter and his wife discover they have taken two dozen aspirins between them, the effect is too macabre to be obscene. It is the effect of those medieval woodcuts where skeletons dance beside the beds of lovers.

On the farthest right of the five screens is a movie of cunts--cunt after cunt after cunt--cunts as dark as work boots, cunts as pink as mousekin, cunts with only a few blonde hairs, cunts as furry as the flanks of woolly mammoths, cunts that are a modest slit, cunts that jag about like the banks of the Amazon. . . .

The reporter and his wife both doze off several times during the Fuckorama. When they waken, they always hear a woman's tireless, soft, unemotional voice, a voice that has been murmuring all day. The woman is telling a blind person in a wheelchair what is happening on the screens. "On the left, there's a young girl riding a bicycle down a road. Now she's stopped and she's urinating in a patch of woods. A man with a scar is hiding where he can watch her. On the right screen, the cunts have stopped. Now they're showing naked people. There's a bald man with a big penis. Now he's dissolving into a thin man with a little penis. Now he's becoming a stubby woman with lots of pubic hair. On the middle screen, the dog has lost interest again. The woman is laughing and trying to coax him back."

And there is a last lash given by a torturer to a trussed-up pretty woman and a choir's intense rising and falling minor-key "Amen"--and the 15 projectors and carrousels and the quadraphonic sound machinery shut down, and the Fuckorama is over.

Slowly, like people who have watched a sinking passenger liner's lights and engines hiss out, the SAR participants get up, pick up their soft gay pillows and go silently to the last small-group meetings of the day.

None of the little rooms have windows, but the people know that the sun is losing its light, taking away what color there is in the industrial district around the SAR. Looking drained and sweaty in his wheelchair, Jonas gives that sweeping motion of his arms and shoulders, sinks his steel-wool beard into his chest and says, "That Fuckorama is a bummer for lots of people."

Joan, the sexy, Slavic-looking group leader, gazes around. "I wonder where everybody's head is at." And the reporter realizes how many youth terms he's been hearing from people at the SAR--"a bummer" . . . "wonder where your head is at" . . . "his/her/your trip" . . . "doing his/her/your own thing" . . . "I hear what you're saying." . . . The 35-and-40-year-old SAR staff never learned these terms while growing up.

"Ugh," says Annie, fastidiously brushing away all past and future human contacts. "I'll never have sex again."

More bleak silence. People pull into themselves, reluctant to come near the bag of sweat and guts and desire that constitutes another human being.

"Eric left," says Jonas. "I heard him raising hell in the office area, saying he'd come to learn about sex, not hear other people's filth and watch perverted movies." That trace of sadness in Jonas' voice makes all his statements heavy. Heavy--there it is--another youth word. The reporter is going to come out of this talking like his students.

"I'd like to touch somebody," says Judy, the sexual enthusiast with the librarian's face. "This is a lonely way to end the day." She takes the hand of John, the sex lady's husband, who reaches for the hand of Cynthia, the thin-faced, taut woman with the tight bun of hair. Cynthia takes John's hand and, as she reaches for the hand of Lester, the psychoanalyst who wonders what Freud would think of all this, she unfastens her hair in a quick, unthinking gesture. As her hair falls, its sand color deepens into bronze, its straw texture becomes fluid; and it falls and falls, dropping over her shoulders, over her back, softening her dry white forehead, shielding her ears, molding around her cheeks and throat. A beautiful woman ha appeared in the room. It is a gift to us--no, it is something we have gotten together and produced. Everyone takes the nearest hand, men breaking the taboo and holding a man's hand if a man is nearest.

"All right," murmurs Jonas. And in a mixture of fatigue and sexual tension and affection, the day's last small-group meeting ends.

Afterward, there is a sherry party and Ted Cole does look both forbidding and forlorn as he wanders carrying a small plastic glass. People plop onto their pillows (which they now automatically carry everywhere) and drink sherry; they wander back to their small-group rooms, stand chatting in the office area. No one wants to go home.

When the reporter and his wife do get home, they drop onto their bed and almost instantly go to sleep. The reporter has a long and intricate dream without sex or people; in it, he builds a sailboat plank by plank.

• • •

"How did things go with everybody last night?" is Jonas' first question.

"I called a man who's been a friend for years," says Annie. "I told him to get his body right over because I was so horny I was going to explode. So he came over and--you know what?--we ended up just talking. We talked half the night. And when we went to bed, we wrapped up against each other and went to sleep." She gives her abrupt throaty laugh. "Isn't that odd?"

"No," says Jonas with that smile that's always on the edge of sorrow. "No, it's not odd at all."

"Was wrapping up together important?" asks Cynthia, whose hair is still loose and gleaming, whose outfit today is yellow and soft and shows she's not really so skinny after all.

"It was important," says Annie. "It was a lot more important than fucking. We were--what's the word we've been using?--pleasuring. It was the pleasuring that counted. We touched knees and stomachs and legs and hands. There was such peace to it. I haven't known such peace for a long time." She looks at Jonas. "I can't explain it. . . ."

Jonas shrugs. "Remember the minister. Why not just accept it?"

"My husband and I fucked," says Cynthia, "and I liked being touched." There is an indrawn breath in the group--a tenseness, an expectation--something miraculous is going to be revealed. But not quite.

"I didn't have an orgasm," says Cynthia, "but I did like being touched."

"My wife looked up your Ephesians 5:22, Lester," says John. " 'Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord.' I don't imagine I need to go into what she said. Most of it was swirling around on that wall yesterday. As for last night's sex, it was missionary position. Five minutes. Duty. I think my wife is missing the point of this course."

"We could talk about some counseling, man," says Jonas. "The department is starting up some groups for couples whose sex life isn't what it could be."

• • •

"Desensationalizing"--making people shockproof about sex--was the main purpose of the first day. "Sensitization"--replacing numbness with warmth--is a goal of the second. But most of the films that celebrate relationships are disappointing. There is much nude swimming, much nude horseplay on the grass and--of course--much cheerful fucking. None of the lovers are much over 20, none are unattractive, none of them relate to each other with the intensity of the two homosexuals in the first day's film. The SAR staff recognizes the problem. "It's too bad," says one, "but about the only relationship films available are about young people fucking on the grass in California."

One film, though, is almost too intense to bear. The reporter wonders what would happen if he went to a network biggie and outlined it. "Look, I've got this great idea for a documentary. There're a guy and a girl who want to get married. But they're both spastics in wheelchairs. The guy is too geeky to talk; he sort of squeaks, but he bangs out love poetry for her on a special typewriter. He gets around by twitching at two little levers on his chair. The girl is almost as bad off, except she can talk and push her chair around backward with her feet. She looks like a cross between Liza Minnelli and the 20-year-old Elizabeth Taylor--except her face is always twisting up in these spasms spastics get. They live in an institution for spastics and palsied people and every morning this unemotional guy with a bow tie lifts them up and plops them into their wheelchairs like they're chunks of wood. The guy and girl wheel their chairs all over hell trying to get permission to get married, and after they get it, there's this great nude scene where the guy scrubs her down in the tub. She's got this sexy body, see, because if you're a spastic you're always sort of writhing around, getting exercise whether you want to or not; it keeps you trim as hell. After they're married, they sleep together and geek around in the kitchen and smile and laugh a lot--though it's sort of hard to tell about the last because their faces twitch so much. So how about that for a movie? It's tear-tugging! It's heart-rending! We could call it They Said We Couldn't Love or Love on Wheels or something like that. Maybe General Motors'd sponsor it, to show that people who get crippled in all those defective cars have great lives anyhow."

Fortunately, the British made the movie. They gave it the quiet name Like Other People and filmed it without much attempt to tug tears or rend hearts. It simply does so as it goes along. The scenes of the couple snuggled together in bed, of them laughing as they develop a teamwork system in the kitchen (each using a coordination the other lacks), of him admiring her body as he helps her take a bath--all show such a blend of love, happiness, guts and tragedy that surgeons who have brought myriad death messages from the operating room, nurses who have watched innumerable cancer victims wither and die--at least half the heavies who make up this SAR--are crying. All over the room are sniffs, blown noses, open sobs. And they aren't "Oh, look at the poor things" sobs; they're "My God, the grandeur of the human spirit" sobs. In one scene that is usually a cliché--the lovers meandering down a lane lined with glowing-white birches with leaves of shriveled gold--the man is bumping forward in his chair while the woman is pushing backward with slow, awkward movements, helping guide him on the gravel road. The scene is held for push after push of her legs, wobble after wobble of his chair, until the audience is buried under the terrible effort of the smallest things these people do.

There is one other extraordinary relationship movie. It is called Touching and one woman mentions that she has come 2500 miles to see it. To those in the helping professions, Touching is what Hedy Lamarr's Ecstasy once was to the general public: less a film than a myth--rumored to contain amazing things, no one quite sure what they are.

Touching is a movie of an able-bodied wife and a quadriplegic husband making love, and the reporter sees it while sitting in one of the small-group rooms with the female star, an attractive, solid-bodied, strong-faced blonde named Nancy. While Nancy chats on her pillow beside the reporter on his pillow, the open door shows her, huge, pink and naked, on the screen in the main projection room. She is helping her husband onto a water bed, the two of them smiling at each other, kissing, stroking, nuzzling--the husband with the snubbed, spread-eagle movements the reporter has grown used to in Jonas.

"We thought about making this movie for a long time," Nancy says. "Ted Cole encouraged us, saying there was no better way to show people with battered bodies that they could enjoy them. We had to clear making the movie through the university, the city, the state--through just about every agency there is. We even had to hire a lawyer and when we went to see him, he made Ted wait outside in the car so he couldn't be sub-poenaed as a witness later."

Nancy has lovely breasts that press tightly against her blouse. On the screen, the breasts are three feet across and they soar and dip and wobble as she moves about her husband's body, puts her mouth to his penis.

"On the day of filming, we were really uptight," says Nancy. " 'Don't worry,' said the film maker, a Methodist minister. 'After ten minutes you will forget I am here.' He was right. As soon as we began, we forgot about everybody else."

On the screen, the huge pink Nancy is riding her husband's cock. It is hard, and as the water bed ripples their bodies into the thrusts of sex, their faces have the lost inward glaze of the faces of technologists concentrating on toggles and dials. There's no showy enjoyment here, just two people lost in sex.

• • •

The disabled people talking and answering questions before the audience call themselves "prize hogs." Larry Kegan, a quadriplegic who has finished college since his accident, who has managed a resort in Mexico, who has traveled with Bob Dylan, sings a talking blues. He has a voice much like Dylan's, only more musical, less harsh.

Accompanying him on the 12-string guitar is the able-bodied handsome husband of a gaminish-looking woman crippled in a teenage car wreck. (Divers, motorcyclists, "Fosbury Flop" high jumpers, trampolinists--these make up much of the young population of a rehab ward.) When the audience is invited to ask personal questions--any personal questions--someone asks the guitar player why he married a woman in a wheelchair. He thinks a moment, laughs. "I liked her better than any other woman I'd met."

A woman, the sexy, short-shorted wife of a paraplegic, answers the same question. "First of all, I liked his looks. I thought he had the handsomest face of any man I'd ever seen." She pauses. "Also, I was in the middle of getting divorced, and I didn't want any sexual entanglements. I thought a man in a wheelchair would be safe." She laughs. "He wasn't."

Ted Cole got into sex professionally after he discovered that a group of young male wheelchair patients would rather get back their sexual ability than their ability to walk. "Here we'd been devoting all our efforts to one area," says Cole, "and completely neglecting the other. We set out to discover what disabled patients could do sexually."

A disabled man remembers sex counseling 15 years before. "Nobody would talk to me about sex. I wanted to know what I could do and how I could do it. The nurses acted like I was a dirty little boy, the occupational-training people and the physiotherapists acted like I was a pervert. But I kept at them and they finally gave me an appointment with a doctor. It was for six at night in an empty ward. I wheeled myself up there, feeling I was about to be let in on some huge mystery. The doctor was there, a white shadow in the dark ward. I pulled my wheelchair up to him. He made a gesture, pushing me backward--then another gesture, and another, until he'd backed me into the farthest corner. He pulled a chair up in front of mine and sat down so our knees were touching. He looked around, made sure there was nobody else in the room and leaned forward. His face was just a few inches from mine. He checked for people again. Then he whispered, 'Find an understanding girl.' And he got up and ran. That was the kind of education chair people got before Ted Cole."

Another disabled man describes how he found an understanding girl. "I paid for her. I hired a prostitute. It was hard to get my nerve up that first time. I thought she might look at me and say no. That'd be pretty devastating, to be turned down by a whore. But she didn't turn me down. She worked with me for a couple of years and we got to be pretty good friends."

"Were you capable of much sexually?" asks someone in the SAR.

The man answers with undisguised pleasure, "I was capable of a lot."

There is some mystery here, something related to fantasy, but which the disabled describe as far more real. People who would not feel burns on their genitals report having orgasms. "It's not quite like the orgasm I had before my accident," says a man in a chair, "but something happens that I couldn't describe as anything but an orgasm."

Says another, "I'm better off than I was before my accident. Then I'd only come one or two times a night. Now I have multiple orgasms."

One staff member has a paraplegic friend who can masturbate to orgasm by rubbing his armpit. "He gets a charge out of beating off in public," says the staff member.

Says another paraplegic, "I like to feel my cock with my hand when I'm fucking. It makes my orgasm more intense." Most of the men report a definite sense of ejaculation.

Conventional medicine has its suspicions of such reports. "It might even be a little cruel," says an orthopedic surgeon, "to put such a premium on sex for people who obviously don't have the physiological pathways to enjoy it."

• • •

The seminar is nearly over. Jonas gives the small group a brief speech. "Of course, we always say this, but I mean it especially this time. This has been a fascinating group. There've been a variety and an interplay I've never seen before." There are goodbyes. Lester is thanked half a dozen times for his honesty and he beams every time.

Cynthia, whose shoes are off now, whose hair is down and shining, says, "People told me these SARs were terrifying, but I've felt so safe with this group. I wish we could just keep meeting for a year."

Judy again looks the brown-mouse librarian as she almost whispers, "This is the first time I've publicly admitted I'm bisexual."

Joan, her face radiant, hugs Judy, saying, "I'm glad you shared it with us."

Says John, the sex lady's husband, "I just had an odd thought. It went away, but I had it. I thought maybe bisexuals do live in a richer world; maybe they do have a more profound range of experience than most people."

Judy's timidity is lifting. "It doesn't seem too silly, does it, being so enthusiastic about sex at my age?"

Frank, the rocky prison psychologist, puts his big arms around both Judy and Joan. "Most young girls say dumb things and can't let go in bed. They're like the Rocky Mountains--great to look at, but what do you do then? I like old rounded mountains myself--ones with trails that've been climbed and nice, soft, broken-in places to stretch out and relax."

The women giggle. And everyone is hugging everyone.

"I hope you start having orgasms."

"I hope your marriage works out."

"I hope you get some bright students this year."

"I hope your husband accepts it if you tell him."

There are golden moments of sex-tinged warmth and fellowship and regret with these people the reporter will never see again (except for John, who will meet him on the street a month later and snap his eyes away as if they were two respectable gentlemen who had last met in a whorehouse).

Ted Cole talks to the audience, warning them about the difficulty of taking sex counseling back to their institutions and their supervisors. The reporter remembers that it was less than ten years ago that the Ladies' Home Journal speculated that Masters and Johnson might become unemployable outcasts when Human Sexual Response was released, less than five years ago when Dr. Masters said he hoped to live to see sex counseling and research become respectable. "Now it's more than respectable," says Cole. "It's in demand!"

People linger, talking, touching each other, going further into problems they brought up in their groups. The SAR has been unexpectedly successful. A first scan of the critiques given every participant shows far higher than average ratings. "These are right on the top end of the scale!" says Sandy, all the fatigue and harassment clearing from her face. Staff members clustered around her give similar exclamations.

The pleasure spills over into a staff party at the apartment of the 12-string guitarist and his gamin-faced wife. The room lights glint off the chrome of wheelchairs, but the reporter barely notices now who is in a chair and who is not. (Walking across the apartment complex to the party, he had started toward some people clustered around bicycles on a lawn; his mind had seen the bikes as wheelchairs.) At the party, people are singing, repeating a rock-song chorus, "Joy to you and me." Ted's glasses are off; what is left of his hair is awry; he is everywhere--drinking wine, sitting in the lap of a woman in a wheelchair. "Our work with the SAR means a lot of people assume Sandy and I are swingers," he says. "We're always being given opportunities. But we don't do any of that. I guess we're just monogamous by nature." Looking at his wife, seated against a post but very tall, with her firm and languorous body, her auburn hair in that lily maid of Astolat sweep, an expression of tranquil enjoyment on her face, the reporter can understand Ted's monogamy.

The guitarist and Larry Kegan begin on Mr. Bojangles. Both have beautiful voices. Ted slides up on the floor beside them and begins a harmonicalike accompaniment with his mouth. He can really do a harmonica. His face is red and alight with cheer.

This is not the stern Ted Cole whose contribution to the SAR is "authority and the white coat"; this is the Ted Cole who once skied down the stairs of a St. Paul mansion, almost clobbering Walter Heller, the former Presidential advisor.

As the reporter and his wife leave, this group's openness and vitality spill through the door into the dim hallway, suffusing the apartment house with life, sending bolts of life out into the warm night. It's a lovely realization, that in a world of arrogant stupids, of corporate grabbers, of piously fascist officials who would all box up everyone else's sunlight and deprive others of the smell after a rain, if they thought they could improve their own status or fortunes from it--it's lovely to realize that there are still pockets, tiny lost continents, where the spirit thrives, where people's lives have not been folded away in wallets or buried under tax shelters in old socks.

Outside, the reporter puts his arm around his wife--this familiar woman of his life. "I thought we might do a little pleasuring when we get home," he says.

"That's been in my mind quite a while."

And their clothes, pressed tightly together, whisper as they walk across the grass.