The Year in Sex

It looked, for a while, as if we weren't going to have anything to talk about in this department this year. Had the Moral Majority, Women Against Pornography and others of their shrill ilk succeeded in driving everybody underground? Or were people so worried about the sagging economy that they couldn't get anything else up, either? Most of the stories that crossed our desks were about censorship (the cable-TV show that had to be shot in two versions; the record sleeve for Queen's single Body Language--featuring, naturally enough, a couple of tastefully bared bodies--that had to be shipped with an optional plain white sleeve). Folks in Muncie, Indiana, who are obviously getting their concept of teenage lingo from Happy Days, talked PBS brass into scissoring an episode on real teens from its theretofore highly praised Middletown series, mainly because they were horrified at the kids' use of swear words. While some professional ditherers were worrying about steamy sex scenes on cable TV, others were pointing the finger at good, gray Phil Donahue for the variety of unconventional topics discussed on his popular network show. Some titles: "Children of Gays," "Underwater Births," "Transsexual Twins," "Teen Birth Control" and "Incest: A Family Crisis," featuring a woman who claimed her father had molested her as a child--along with said father, who admitted it, and his wife, who told how she felt about it. Father Knows Best was never like this. Time ran a cover story about herpes and another about the baby boom, the combination of which sounded to some of us like papal bull (don't do it unless you're married, and then only if you're making a baby). Professor Barry Singer resigned under pressure from the faculty of Cal State Long Beach, reportedly for offering students extra credit (text concluded on page 168)Year in Sex(continued from page 138) for such activities as trips to gay bars (though it was later rumored that some of his coeds had been offering cherries rather than apples to the teacher). Judge William Reinecke of Grant County, Wisconsin, described a five-year-old rape victim as "sexually promiscuous" and was resoundingly re-elected. In the there-ain't-no-justice department, we also had the case of attorney Michael Morgenstern, who wrote a book titled How to Make Love to a Woman, about which he said, "There are many books about what women should want; this book is about what women really want." After his work was published, Morgenstern was arrested for allegedly drubbing his live-in girlfriend and breaking her jaw. News of that event, claims Morgenstern, caused the sales of his book to double.

Then there were the folks who organized Sexpo '82, an exposition for the adult-entertainment industry, in New York. The event (arranged, interestingly enough, mainly by women in the erotica field who wanted to combat the antisex image promulgated by Women Against Pornography) opened on October eighth--and closed October ninth after seven video-tape-merchant exhibitors had been busted for selling cassettes of adult films readily available in almost any video store in the city. Dennis Sobin's Washington, D.C., swingers' club was also busted--but he struck back by running for mayor. Another citizen who didn't take repression lying down was Katharine Hepburn, who--when it looked as if right-to-lifers would succeed in outlawing I.U.D.s and abortions even in cases of incest--fought back with an impassioned (and widely circulated) letter in defense of Planned Parenthood, a movement her mother had helped found.

Almost unnoticed by the media was the fact that 1982 marked the tenth anniversary of history's first porno hit, Deep Throat. We checked to see what had happened to its principals; all except for Linda Lovelace are still (or again) making adult films. Linda split from Chuck Traynor, who claimed he'd taught her the sword-swallowing act (he's now with Marilyn Chambers), has married again and recently worked to promote Not a Love Story, a supposedly antipornography Canadian-made documentary that has itself been banned as obscene in the province of Ontario.

There were a few gleams in the gloom, some of them funny--such as the two personals ads in the Dallas Morning News, one seeking a wife, the other a mistress; the mistress message outpulled the wife pitch. Some were sad, such as the tale of the scientist who excited a rare whooping crane into laying an egg (fertilized by artificial insemination) by doing a mating dance with her. The egg hatched and mother and baby were doing well--until Mom was killed by marauding raccoons.

Observers of the Washington scene were, for a time, licking their chops over the potential of a sex-and-drug scandal laid at the closet doorstep of Congress when ex-page Leroy Williams charged that members of the House were getting some pretty special deliveries from their messengers. That investigation blew up when Williams confessed he'd been lying all along. And observers of unusual religious groups expected juicy tidbits when the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh moved their ashram lock, stock and red-orange garb from Poona, India, to a tract of dried-up range land near Antelope, Oregon. Reports of uninhibited sexual goings on at the Indian locale, documented by a moviemaker, had led one wag to dub the film Poontang in Poona, and there was initially some town-and-gown friction in Antelope. Bhagwan's disciples, called sannyasins, solved it by incorporating their own town, Rajneeshpuram; inviting 5000 enthusiasts from all over the world to a tent-city festival on the premises; and, by all reports, making the desert bloom by building dams and greenhouses, planting grains, 3400 fruit trees and 12,000 grape vines, raising cattle, chickens, ducks and honeybees. The result has been that, while nobody denies Bhagwan's premise that acting out sexuality relieves tension, most of the press Rajneeshpuram has been getting lately deals with animal husbandry rather than with other kinds of horseplay.

Still more religious news came by way of the Unification Church, whose spiritual leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, joined 2075 couples in marriage in what must have been history's biggest blind date. The Reverend Moon picked the pairs, then told them they'd have to wait to consummate their unions until he got the word from the Man Upstairs--after a period estimated at 40 days to several years. We doubt that the Moonies will have much truck with another, and considerably smaller, body of worshipers meeting in a San Francisco apartment. The congregation calls itself the Church of Saint Priapus--and, as all you Latin and Greek students out there may have guessed, its object of veneration is the male sex organ.

Not until the year was half gone did its real sexual headlines begin to surface, from, of all places, the courtroom. When the rich and famous get sued or divorced, the fur--and reports of indiscretions--begins to fly. We should have had a hint in January, when Sheila Dowling, 17, described as the live-in secretary and social companion of Huntington Hartford, the 70-year-old heir to the A & P fortune, filed a $65,000,000 lawsuit against Hartford, his fourth ex-wife, Elaine Kay, and a teenaged girl, accusing the women of having tied her to a bed, stripped her and shaved her head while a sleeping Hartford ignored her cries. Next we heard from one Vicki Morgan, who filed a multimillion-dollar palimony suit against Alfred Bloomingdale, scion of the New York Bloomie's family. When Al died, Vicki made his estate the target of her suit, to the disgust of his wife, Betsy, a close buddy of Nancy Reagan's. A judge, ruling that Vicki was nothing more than a well-paid mistress, turned down the better part of her request, but she's appealing.

In England, a royal fuss was stirred up over the visit to the Caribbean of Prince Andrew and Koo Stark, whose main claim to fame had been that she had starred in a soft-core movie, Emily. All the billing and Kooing sold newspapers and persuaded producers of another flick Stark had made to release it at last.

But the definitive winner of the sex-scandal sweepstakes of 1982 surfaced in, of all places, socially stuffy Palm Beach, Florida. Peter Pulitzer, grandson of newspaper publisher Joseph of prize fame, wants to split from his second wife, Roxanne, and get custody of their five-year-old twins. So far, Roxanne has either admitted to or been accused of the following: a lesbian affair with Jacquie Kimberly, third wife of James Kimberly, heir to the Kimberly-Clark (Kleenex, Kotex, etc.) fortune; sleeping with a real-estate salesman, a French baker, a Belgian race-car driver, an alleged drug dealer and a supernatural trumpet; and having propositioned her 26-year-old stepdaughter, Liza. Roxanne, for her part, has accused hubby of indulging in threesomes with her and Mrs. Kimberly (pooh-poohed by Mrs. K.) and of having committed incest with his daughter (denied by both Liza and Dad). Then there were the allegations of drug use, the stories of bedroom seances involving a dozen or more friends, even a few death threats. Mrs. Kimberly claims the Pulitzers are just out for publicity. If so, the press was glad to oblige.

Is This What They Mean by Audio-Visual Aids?

All That Flash

Where's the Rabbit?

They Recall Books, Don't They?

We Love New York...and Paris

Heavenly Daze

Sex-Scandal Sweepstakes

Here Come De Judges

Physical-Fitness Buffs

Anything for a Buck

Is There a Doctor in the House?

All the Nudes That Fit We Print

It's a Drag

Time Flies When You're Having Fun

But the definitive winner of the sex-scandal sweepstakes of 1982 surfaced in, of all palces, Palm Beach.”