Sex is Back!

I remember the first clue that sex was back. It came a few months ago, when I was eating lunch in Washington, D.C., with my friend Frank. He was telling me about a date with the daughter of the ambassador of some small, exotic land. He said, "She had on some kind of perfume they wear only in, like, Angkor Wat, and she had a pretty goodsized mustache, which depressed me, but she took off her clothes in the kitchen, which made me feel better." Suddenly I thought: What in the world is Frank, of all people, doing having sex?

Then it came to me with another start that he wasn't the only one. Not only Frank but Mike and Tom, too.

Washington lobbyist Frank was involved in two meaningless affairs: a weekends-only fling with a beautiful young matron from New York who was thinking about leaving her investment-banker husband, on the grounds that he was bad in bed, even by the standards of investment bankers, and a weekday-afternoon thing with a 23-year-old secretary who had at first hewed to a rule of oral sex only, on the grounds that putting another person's penis in your mouth does not constitute cheating on one's live-in boyfriend, but who ended up doing all sorts of things, on the grounds of what the hell.

Mike, a New York mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, had just gone on a series of dates that ate up many billable hours and had on at least one occasion performed an act of physical exertion for which he was in no way financially recompensed.

Tom, a Connecticut writer whose last prolonged romantic engagement occurred during the Whip Inflation Now campaign, had acquired a girlfriend at the beach and spent the entire summer in embrace, including one night during which there were five separate occasions when at least one of the parties claimed to be having an orgasm.

I figured right away that I was looking at a trend. Frank, Mike and Tom are people like me, and people like me--middleclass, hetero and roughly 28 to 40 years old--are America's official sexual-trend group. Our sex life has been the subject of two decades of intense theorizing.

People like me may not necessarily have had more real sex than our parents, but we have had more theoretical sex than any group in history: Sex as a Statement Against the War, Sex as a Religious Act, Sex as the Meaning of Life, Sex as a Group Endeavor, Sex as a Performing Art, Sex as Oppression, Sex as Liberation, Sex as Violence Against Womankind (or at least against Andrea Dworkin), Sex as Therapy, Sex as Pathology, Sex as Addiction, Sex as the Enemy of the People (or at least the Meese commission) and, finally, with AIDS, Sex as a Fatal Attraction.

In this last trend, people like me reportedly have been, for the past few years, very depressed and staying at home and having hardly any sex because AIDS is going to kill us all.

When, against our better judgment, we succumbed to sex, we used condoms with virus-killing chemicals. We used dental dams, thin sheets of latex kept between tongue and thing to be tongued. We required partners to divulge their sexual histories and to have tests for AIDS before we slept with them, and we carried cards in our wallets and purses to show we had tested clean. If we got AIDS-free lovers, we cleaved only unto them, in what was grandly called The New Monogamy. Some of us gave up on sex entirely, in The New Chastity, and replaced it with eating a lot (The New Eating) or running triathlons (The New Throwing Up) or curling up in a fetal position and crying until medical authorities took us away (The New Jim Bakker).

I should mention that none of my friends is--not to put too fine a point on it--Mel Gibson. Neither am I. Sometimes we have dates on Saturday night; sometimes we have the bulldog edition of The New York Times. In periods of easy living, sexwise, we do OK, but when anything like The New Chastity sets in, we are among the first to feel the pinch.

So when I was confronted by the evidence of Frank, Mike and Tom, I wondered, What is going on here? If even my friends are having sex again, does that mean what I think it does? Can sex be back? Why? Where has it been? If sex is back, is it the same sex that went away? Will people like me, set in our ways and all, be able to do it? Or will we have to go to re-education camps?

I started looking for answers by interviewing 24,000 men and women between the ages of 18 and 50, using a detailed questionnaire that covered 137 categories of sexual behavior and attitude. Not really; that's just a gag I borrowed from Shere Hite. Really, I started looking for answers by hanging around in places where people who are interested in committing sex tend to congregate, such as singles bars and Congressmen's offices.

Is sex back?

This is my main finding: Sex is, in fact, back.

The stuff is everywhere. Practically everyone I know is having sex and the ones who aren't say they do not wish to be New Celibates but are just, at this time, in a dry spell.

I base my finding on the following: (1) I called a lot of friends up on the telephone and asked them, "Is there sex there?" They all said yes, there was. "In Boston, we are screwing with abandon," said my corporate-lawyer friend Kate, neatly summing up the common viewpoint. (2) I went to several crowded singles bars in Washington, D.C., and New York and I asked a number of boys and girls if they were there because (A) they liked being shoved around in a hot, smoky haze while strangers poured beer on them or (B) they wanted to meet someone of the opposite sex with an eye toward a sexual relationship. My notes from that evening, which are on napkins, are a little splotchy, but it appears that 75 percent picked B, two percent picked A, 23 percent ad-libbed smart-aleck answers that I chose to ignore and an aide to Senator Robert C. Byrd called me a jerk.

Why is sex back?

The short reason sex is back, of course, is that an ever-growing number of people no longer believe they are going to get AIDS from doing it. (There is a longer, more complex reason, too, but we'll get to that later.)

Some samplings of opinion:

•; Theresa is 41, a San Franciscan and an enthusiastic child of the sexual revolution. She is bisexual and for 20 years, she has had an extremely active sex life. "When the AIDS scare hit," she says, "I picked the best sex partner I could find and said, 'Let's get married.' I was monogamous for over a year. Then we broke up and I went through a period of absolutely minimal sex, trying to put a stopper on it, and being very afraid."

Last year, Theresa--afraid no more--defected from the corporate world and became a $200-an-hour New Age callgirl. Business is so good she takes only referrals. She has sex with, on the average, six men a week. In her off hours, she has one primary lover, a middle-aged man, but is also sleeping regularly with a woman about her own age and half a dozen other people every month. "It is my personal belief that the AIDS scare was greatly exaggerated," she says.

•; Bradley Jay is 32, a Bostonian and the host of a popular nighttime radio talk show called Rock & Romance that is devoted to sex, love and courtship. I have known Brad since college and I always have thought of him as America's sexual bellwether, the equivalent of one of those little East Oatmeal, Maine, kind of towns you read about every four years that have voted for the winner of every Presidential election since Polk. Sexually speaking, as goes Brad, so goes the nation.

Some of the things Brad introduced me to were so far ahead of their time that nothing like them has happened to me since. Once, on a summery day in 1978, he talked me and two girls we knew into taking off our clothes and driving with him in his Volkswagen down Interstate 95 from Durham, New Hampshire, to Boston. Another time, he got me involved in a "sensory experiment" in which we rubbed watermelon on a girl we knew who was of an amiable nature.

Brad was the first guy I knew who had sex with two women at the same time. He was the first guy I knew who had an open relationship and--this is the important part--the first guy I knew who practiced safe sex.

I believe, in fact, that Brad invented safe sex way back in 1980. He limited himself for more than a year to one partner (considered a shocker in those days) and he talked about safe sex all the time. Except in those days, we called it "not fucking," which had a double disadvantage: You couldn't talk about it in polite society and it hardly sounded like an accomplishment.

Now Brad says, "I wouldn't say I am monogamous. I'd say--what's three?--triogamous." Although he says he still considers himself "Mr. Margin of Safety," he doesn't use condoms. His safety precaution? "Usually, I go out with young girls who have had, like, only one boyfriend."

The people calling into his radio show don't seem very concerned about AIDS, either. "People are getting used to AIDS," he says. "It's, like, no big problem. It's just another disease. And it won't even look that bad compared with the plague. It'll just be a question on a quiz one day."

•; Rebecca is 30, an emergency-room nurse in Baltimore. She has been dating a doctor for several months. She doesn't use condoms. "I don't think I'm going to sleep with anybody who has AIDS. I think my chances are very low," she says. "I see three or four people a day in the E.R. with AIDS. In Washington, they were all gay. In Baltimore, they are all I.V.-drug users. I have never (continued on page 162)Sex is Back!(continued from page 124) seen a heterosexual with AIDS, except for one woman who was married to a hemophiliac."

•; Mark Shaffer is a 30ish New York advertising executive. He has lived in Manhattan since 1982. "When AIDS first came out, of course you were going to believe it," he says. "But then you think: I haven't heard of anyone I know getting it. How long can you run around scared? At some point, you realize it's a bunch of crap. And you get back to normal business. The scare is off."

Are these people nuts?

No. They have merely come to terms with AIDS and risk assessment. They are, I think, representative of most heterosexual Americans.

Clinicians whose work involves both AIDS patients and sexually active heterosexuals say--disapprovingly--that they have seen a marked change in attitude in the past year. "People just aren't paying attention anymore," says Dr. Robert Murphy, director of the Biopsychosocial Center of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. "They perceive it as a drug addict's and gay's disease. It's not hitting me that the straights see they are very much at risk. They're tired of AIDS. They've heard about it so many times and it just isn't sinking in."

Dr. Joyce Wallace, president of the Foundation for Research on Sexually Transmitted Diseases, says that a year ago, her Manhattan clinic routinely saw middle-class heterosexual couples coming in for testing before beginning sexual relationships. Not anymore. Heterosexual couples "are now relaxing," she says. "I do see that. I think there was more worry about it a year ago."

Michael Applebaum knows too well whereof these doctors speak. In 1987, Applebaum, himself a doctor and lawyer, co-founded a company called Care Card that offered to provide fee-paying clients with cards attesting to the fact that they had tested AIDS-free. Three years later, Care Card is essentially out of business, a flop because there was almost no demand for its service. Applebaum says only a few hundred customers signed up. "It's very tough to change a population's thinking," he says. "You can scare 'em for a week. You can scare 'em for a month. After that, it's a problem. You just can't keep the necessary pressure on people."

There was, and is, of course, good reason to treat AIDS with fear or at least respect. Heterosexuals do get AIDS. Most of them get it from tainted needles used to inject illegal drugs, but a small number of AIDS cases have been traced to boy-meets-girl sexual contact. The majority of these cases involve inner-city black and Hispanic people who have slept with I.V.-drug users, but people like me--white middle-class types who sleep with white middle-class types--do rarely get AIDS.

That said, most AIDS experts have come to believe that the risk posed to most heterosexuals, at least in this country, has so far proved to be extremely low. Drs. Norman Hearst and Stephen Hully, in a 1988 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, concluded that for a person who engages in heterosexual intercourse with someone who is not in a high-risk group and has tested negative for HIV the risk of infection per act is only about one in 5,000,000. Condom usage increases that to one in five billion.

Sex is back because a lot of people figured that that was the kind of risk they were prepared to take.

What kind of sex is back?

Gosh. Where do I begin? All kinds of sex are back, including some stuff I wasn't expecting at all. I found out all about it in an exhaustive personal survey conducted in the pure light of science. In this survey, I spent two months talking about sex, a week reading about sex, four evenings in singles bars, two evenings in an S/M club, one evening in a swingers' club, a day in a sex institute, three hours on the telephone listening to pay-per-call sex talk and a night with my girlfriend in a sex motel. All in all, I had a very nice time.

Here are some of the highlights of my research:

•; Looking for Mr. Goodbar--The Sequel, Scene One. Friday evening, July 1989, in Fair Harbor, Fire Island, a pleasant little town on the Atlantic. Some towns on Fire Island are almost exclusively gay in the summer months, but Fair Harbor attracts a straight crowd. Most evenings, everyone congregates, drink in hand, on the town dock to watch the sunset. Actually, no one ever really looks at the sky. They are all too busy mingling, and those among them who are not encoupled are desperately, frantically hunting for someone of the opposite sex. It is as if a 1979 cocktail party on New York's Upper West Side has slid across the space-time continuum and plopped out here, ten years later and 50 miles away, on the Fair Harbor dock. The 30ish women outnumber the 30ish men maybe three to one, and they're hungry. Two gals hustle by me on their way to swoop down on a cluster of men. Says one to the other, "I don't care what they look like. It's already Friday. Go for anything."

Of all the sex that was supposed to be out, casual sex was the biggest out of all. In 1985, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued a stern order: "If you have a monogamous relationship, keep it. If you don't have one, get it." Soon enough, the media were telling us that we were, indeed, following doctors' orders.

"America's affair with casual sex ... is giving way to a time of caution and commitment.... Casual sex and one-night stands are now for daredevils," said Geraldo Rivera; and if you can't believe Geraldo, who can you believe?

There was some evidence that young single heterosexuals did cut back on casual or one-time sex during the AIDS years. A 1988 survey for Time magazine found that 22 percent of New York City singles aged 18 to 34 claimed to have given up sex entirely. A 1986 Masters and Johnson survey of 425 heterosexual adults, most of whom were middle-class whites, found that 72 percent of the women and 63 percent of the men said they had become more cautious about sex because of AIDS.

But frankly, I always had my suspicions. How come the singles bars didn't go out of business? What reporters and pollsters overlooked, I think, is that people tend to give the expected answers to questions of an emotionally charged nature. If you are standing in a singles bar at a time when everybody in America, especially your mother, is warning you about AIDS and a reporter asks you if you are being more careful now, the expected answer is yes.

Tom W. Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, says that his analysis of poll results suggests that single heterosexuals did modify behavior because of AIDS but that the change was nowhere nearly as dramatic as some press accounts reported. "The New Chastity seems to be one of the most unsubstantiated trends I've ever heard of," he says. "It was based on three anecdotes in a New York bar, as far as I can tell."

At any rate, to the degree that singles-bar sex ever vanished, it is surely back now, as I found in visits to the standing-room-only singles-bar districts in New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and Baltimore. "It's wide open," says Dave, a 32-year-old Washington lawyer. "There are as many as a dozen bars where you can go and pick up girls.... Women make it very clear if they are interested. Sleeping with them on the first date is frequently not a problem. If it is, by the second or third date, you are in there.... There is absolutely no problem getting laid in this town if you are halfway respectable-looking and coherent."

My friend Sally is 31 and not at all inclined to take silly risks. She does use condoms and she doesn't do one-night stands. But last year, she found herself in bed on the third date with an attractive fellow she had met in a bar only a couple of weeks before. "I know that I shouldn't have done it," she says. "I should have asked all those questions about past sexual history--I mean, I think it's crazy not to--but I don't have time to wade through all that."

•; Swinging Sex. I thought swinging had gone the way of all flesh, so to speak--another victim of AIDS. "Barring the development of a vaccine, swingers of all persuasions may sooner or later be faced with the reality of a new era of sexual caution and restraint," declared Time.

But you can't keep a sex trend down, as I found out when I went with my friend Holly to Le Trapeze, which Screw magazine says has "inherited the status once held by Plato's Retreat as the primary venue for old-line, couples-only swinging." Le Trapeze is a discreet little place on Manhattan's East Side that would be indistinguishable from your average New Jersey supper club except for the sign that says No Oral and Anal Sex and the fact that all the customers are more or less naked.

I learned a lot at Le Trapeze. One thing I learned was that it is embarrassing for a couple to be the only people in a place with clothes on. I did try to take my clothes off so I could be one of the fellows, and that was when I learned what real embarrassment is: when you are the only man wearing clothes surrounded by about 100 naked people and you try to take your clothes off and the attendant makes you put them back on. In front of everybody.

"Sir, the club rules are that couples may disrobe only as couples. You may not disrobe unless your partner disrobes at the same time."

"Ah," I said. "Club rules?"

"Yes, sir," he said.

Then I put on all my clothes and tried to walk with an insouciance that suggested I had just whimsically changed my mind about being naked.

The way Le Trapeze works, you and your date may pop into one of four small, lockable rooms on the first floor and do it in private (which seems to be missing the point) or you may do it in the open party room on wall-to-wall industrial mattresses with other couples doing it and/or watching you. Another option is to make friends with one or more couples and go upstairs to a semiprivate room to do it en semimasse. The kinky variant I explored was to go around like Sergeant Joe Friday, asking people for just the facts on swinging.

A very nice man named Judd (who looked as though he probably used to know Jimmy Hoffa) and his date, Lorraine (a pretty, slightly hippieish woman in her 30s), told us a lot. Judd said we wouldn't be so nervous once we got naked. "It's just like dancing. First time, you go out there on the floor and you think everybody is watching every move you make; but after you do it for a while, you realize nobody is paying attention to you. Nobody is looking at you and saying, 'What a schmuck.'"

Easy for him to say. Nobody made him put his clothes back on.

As the scene at Le Trapeze suggests, swinging has swung back, after a terrific AIDS-related downturn in 1986 and 1987. Robert "King of Swing" McGinley, president of the North American Swing Clubs Association (NASCA) and of Lifestyles Organization (which organizes the swingers' annual Lifestyles convention), says business is booming. The 1989 Lifestyles convention in Las Vegas broke attendance records, with nearly 3000 participants. "Swinging went through a rather drastic downturn, thanks to the media," McGinley says. "First of all, with the insane hype of herpes. Then, just when people were getting over that, AIDS came along. Participation in swinging decreased forty to fifty percent nationwide." Membership in NASCA "took a nose dive" from a high of 2500 people to fewer than 1000.

But now, he and others in the swinging line say, that trend has reversed itself and the pent-up demand is creating a surge of interest. McGinley says swinging clubs are open in San Francisco, Detroit, Florida and elsewhere and membership in the 75 clubs in NASCA is on the rise.

Patti Thomas, managing editor of the nation's largest chain of swinging magazines, the Cleveland-based Connection Magazines, says that circulation and advertisements are sharply up in the 14 magazines she edits, after a drop of 20 to 30 percent in 1986 and 1987. "Everything is coming back up," she says. "The number of ads is up, the number of responses is up and we are seeing a resurgence of club openings. For a while, people were getting out of it. They were afraid. Now they are coming back. It's not back to the 1980 levels, but it's heading that way."

•; Married-People Sex. Lots and lots of married people are having sex. With their spouses, I mean. Maybe more than ever. I know this because I went to the Sybaris Club and interviewed Ken Knudson, who is Downers Grove, Illinois', foremost authority on married-people sex. In 1974, when swinging came to the suburbs and mothers of three wore hotpants, Knudson bought a suburban motel north of Chicago and remodeled it into the Sybaris Club, a getaway for married-people sex.

Business has been booming ever since. Knudson has opened a second Sybaris, even bigger and fancier, and plans to launch three more soon. He's sometimes booked solid for months in advance, even though he charges as much as $475 a night for the poshest digs. All of this is due to postmarital coupling. Sybaris keeps tabs on these things and says 90 percent of its clientele are married, another five percent engaged. "The demand is higher than ever," says Knudson. "And we're talking almost exclusively about married couples. Sex experimenting outside marriage has absolutely gone away. No question. I have watched our society go through promiscuous sex to swinging and now, for most people, it's back to wanting a healthy one-on-one relationship."

I happen to have a healthy one-on-one relationship these days, so I invited my on-one to join me at the Sybaris to get a feel for what married-people sex was like. Among other things, it turned out to be very wet. Our cottage had a steam bath and a whirlpool, and a big swimming pool off the bedroom.

The most ambitious thing about married-people sex is the Taiwan Basket, which is a sort of sling made out of nylon and suspended by ropes from a big hook right over the middle of the bed. The sling has a pretty big hole in the seat. The idea is that the man lies on his back on the fake-fur-covered water bed under the mirrored ceiling while his ladyfriend sits in the sling and--well, I hope you get the idea. In my opinion, the Taiwan Basket is not for people with a keen sense of the ridiculous.

•; New Age Sex. It's easy to make fun of New Age thinking, what with Shirley MacLaine's announcing that she was Daddy Warbucks in a previous life and all. But have you thought about New Age sex?

Like a lot of other New Age phenomena, New Age sex is a direct descendant of Sixties hippie philosophy, 25 years older, a bit grayer, the VW bug traded in for a Mercedes, the mantra for a tantra. It is the free love (remember free love?) of the Nineties, and it seems to be flourishing in (where else?) California. Theresa, the callgirl I mentioned earlier, is a devotee of New Age sex, and so are a growing number of her friends. They are nice, gentle people, if perhaps a bit--well, you remember the Sixties. So much talk and such serious talk.

"People are getting together in a multidimensional way," explains Paul, a 52-year-old veteran of California living who is Theresa's main lover. "You reach out with a friend and you start lining up the vibrations and putting them in alignment and then putting them in different parts of your bodies and doing it in a very delicious way. It's the new free love and it's definitely happening again."

Theresa, Paul and all the other New Agers are graduates of Sex, Love & Intimacy workshops held by San Carlos, California, sexologist Stan Dale. As members with whom I talked explained it, there are thousands of recent Stan Dale graduates practicing a New Age philosophy that involves sharing, spiritualism and group togetherness--and lots of sex. Theresa recently attended a party where she was "sexed," as she says, by eight men, though she actually made love to only three of them. That distinction is less than clear to me, but apparently, all comers were satisfied. There are many such parties.

Stephanie, a 43-year-old, thrice-divorced real-estate agent whose New Age name is something like Moonbeam, spends much of her time on the phone, organizing the monthly parties with the group of 25 to 30 people of which she, Theresa and Paul are part. Parties begin with everyone sitting around in a circle and, as Stephanie says, "sharing what we need from the group, be it one-on-one talking or 'I want five people fucking me at one time,' or 'I don't want any fucking. I just want a massage.' Whatever you need, you get."

The group members say there is a difference between swinging and New Age sex. "The heart space created by this group is the number-one thing," says Stephanie. "We love being close to one another and being physical and sexing one another. There isn't anyone in the group who is just in it because he wants to fuck a lot. We wouldn't let someone like that in."

This is all very interesting but--let's face it--a little esoteric. What kind of sex is back for you?

To answer that, you have to look at why sex went away. Or, rather, why we pretended it went away.

To a large degree, the easing of fear over AIDS is merely an excuse for sex to be back, as the growth of that fear was an excuse for it to go away. It went away, really, because we were tired and confused. And it is back because we have had a little rest and we feel better now, thank you.

People like me have gone through a lot of theoretical sex. In three decades, we've gone through free love, open marriage, experimental sex, swinging, swapping, zipless fucking, serial monogamy, celibacy and sex addiction. Along the way, we discovered the clitoris, the G spot, foreplay, afterplay, the Venus butterfly flick, deep throat, the hum job, the Binaca blast, whipped cream, multispeed vibrators, electric ben-wa balls, emotion lotion, amyl nitrite, bondage, discipline, telephone sex, computer sex, video sex and fax sex. Not to mention the multiple orgasm, the simultaneous orgasm, the clitoral vs. the vaginal orgasm, the four-hour orgasm, the total orgasm, the big orgasm and the meaningful orgasm. Also, the importance of fantasy, the need for sexual self-fulfillment, the art of sensuous massage, the gratification of self, the joy of sex and the 12 steps to end sexual addiction. And astral sex.

We have suffered through far too many sex experts. There were the scientists of sex, the quantifiers in white coats, who, beginning with Freud and Krafft-Ebing and continuing through Pomeroy and Kinsey to Masters and Johnson, defined sex as a pathology and a discipline, a thing apart from life and love that could be calibrated and predicted.

After the quantifiers came the advocates, a second wave of sex experts who told us exactly how to do it (Sex as a Performing Art) and why we must do it exactly as they said (Sex as a Religion and Sex as a Way of Life).

With all this professional attention, it got so that a lot of people thought they just couldn't do it right anymore. As a frail waif expresses it in Woody Allen's Manhattan, "I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind." Speaking for all the rest of us, Woody replies, "I've never had the wrong kind. My worst one was right on the money."

By the time the Eighties rolled around, we were wondering if we really needed all that theoretical sex, the kind that could give us the wrong kind of orgasm. It had become such a burden that there grew, I think, a collective urge to ignore the whole business to put it back in its place.

Thus was the 1982 scare of herpes simplex, type two, greeted with hosannas and headlines, and thus was the overblown threat of AIDS accepted and even relished. The idea of Sex as a Fatal Attraction had a perfect inevitability to it, following as it did all the other "Sex as ..." pronouncements of our lives, and perfect timing as well: It was time for a nap.

Now the rest is over. And we go back to sex. But not, happily enough, the sex we left behind.

In San Francisco, there is a Methodist minister named Ted McIlvenna, a selftrained sexologist for 25 years and the president and founder of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. McIlvenna is all the "Sex as ..." theoreticians rolled into one. He's Sex as Politics: "If you can control people's sexuality, you can control them absolutely." He's Sex as a Performing Art: "Performance is the future of sex." He's Sex as Science: "We hook you up to these electrical gadgets to monitor your pulse, temperature.... We catch it at .03 on a one to ten scale of what turns you on." He's Sex as Mechanics: "We have gotten interested in vibrating cock rings. We find that if a woman can control the rheostat of a cock ring, she can get off whenever she wants to." He's Sex as Religion: "There are many ways to find God. One of the ways ... is through the glorious gift of sexuality." He is, in the end, Sex as a Way of Life; it is, after all, his life.

Ten years ago, people flocked to McIlvenna's institute to spend days watching films, talking, touching, groping in the hot tubs and on the psychedelic pillows strewn on the carpeted floor of the projection room. When I visited McIlvenna at his institute last December, he was practically all alone, in a small cluttered office in the institute's cold and quiet storefront headquarters, surrounded by the sex of yesteryear. Near his desk sat an overflowing box of old vibrators and dildos. Outside the door were thousands of sexually explicit movies, books and magazines dating back to the turn of the century.

Rambling on about sex, McIlvenna hit upon a thought. "When I started," he said, "sex belonged to somebody else. The church. The state. The courts. The police. All of these others. And suddenly, all of those institutions realized that sex didn't belong to them anymore. Sex belonged to the individual. That's the biggest revolution of all and that's not going to go away."

He's right, of course. Sex does belong to the individual, not to anyone else, including all the experts and ideologues, including the Reverend Ted McIlvenna. What happens in bed between lovers is not a societal statement to be wrangled over in the editorial pages. It is not a pathology to be dissected in the laboratory. It is not religion; God is not an orgasm. It is not a sport, spectator or otherwise. It is not politics; there is a world of difference between making love to the body politic and making love to the body and soul next to you. It is not mechanical: Lovemaking is music; vibrators are Muzak. Above all, it is not a way of life. Life is a way of life. Sex is part of life. At its least, it is a fleeting pleasure. At its best--and left to itself, apart from the graspings of theoreticians and politicians--it is a great and crucial part of the most important thing in life, the love that makes between a man and a woman something of lasting and transcendent value. The thing of value is not the sex itself but all that sex carries with it: the companionship, the intimacy, the defeat of the loneliness that otherwise gets us all.

That old-fashioned kind of sex, the kind that is part of a private and mostly wonderful thing between two people, is what everyone I talked to--even the more sexually adventurous souls such as Frank and Theresa--seems desperately to want these days. Boyfriends are back. Girlfriends are back. Marriage is back. Even babies--nature's intended result of all this sex--are most emphatically back.

Remember my friend Brad, the sexual bellwether of America? If you recall, Brad is dating impressionable young ladies on a fairly casual basis. But that is not what he wants. "I want to settle down," he says. "I tried to have open relationships, but I found all that was bullshit. It was painful to all involved. It was hurtful.... Even if there weren't a disease like AIDS, the cycle would be in this position, because there was a kind of empty feeling there all along, like, Geez, this is fun, but what am I going to do when I'm forty-five with no family and I'm just a lecherous old asshole?"

Sex is back, for most people in the way it was before all the "Sex as ..." trends. Left to ourselves, what we are looking for is not a political statement, not a social experiment, not an endless pursuit of gratification. What we are looking for is love.

In the meantime, a little hanky-panky isn't so bad, either.

"Two gals hustle by me. Says one to the other, 'I don't care what they look like. Go for anything.'"