The joy of gay sex
“I found that the more in affectionate two people are, the more easily it is for them to injure each other.”
Since 1977, The Joy of Gay Sex has educated generations of gay men in all areas of sex and want — and perhaps just as subversive, it also includes an equal number of passages of a nonsexual essence. Co-writers Dr. Charles Silverstein and novelist Edmund White wanted to create a first-of-its-kind guidebook for every aspect of the gay experience.
The book has been seized by customs agents around the world, burned, and banned. But it’s also gone on to be translated into five languages and was revised in 1993 and then again in 2006 (co-authored by Silverstein and Felice Picano).
And who can forget the drawings?
The biting of a nipple, the curl of pubic hair — no detail was left out. The images were intended to be as stimulating as the writing.
It used to be that to learn much of the communication in The Bliss of Gay Sex, customers at bookstores had to request to see a copy of the groundbreaking book that was often kept under the counter and out of sight so as not to offend anyone. But lgbtq+ people now own smartphones and computers with 24/7 access to the internet, wher
The New Joy of Gay Sex
But for me the most astounding thing is that, while once again the writers don't look to have a great amount of respect for the idea of life-long monogamous relationships (it's certainly not something they encourage), they do seem to actively promote having sex with animals! They see nothing unhealthy or abnormal or immoral or unethical in such behaviou
On Its 40th Anniversary, Revisiting the Powerful Communal Vision of The Joy of Gay Sex
When I started college at Tufts University 30 years ago this plummet, my active sex life was a mere two months antique and included just two partners. Early in my first semester, in the tiny library in our campus gay group’s cramped office on the third floor of an unmarked clapboard residence, I found The Joy of Gay Sex, which Edmund Light co-authored with Dr. Charles Silverstein a decade earlier, in 1977. Too nervous to take it back to my dorm, I sat on a rump-sprung sofa behind the office’s closed doors and nervously flipped through the pages. Although the book was only 10 years old, it already seemed like a document from a distant age.
AIDS had hit the headlines several years earlier, when I was starting junior high, so I’d never thought or even fantasized about sex in a way that didn’t involve risk—constantly looming, often unknowable, potentially fatal. But because The Joy of Gay Sex was published before the epidemic began, it didn’t contain any of the specific information about HIV or condoms or protected sex I urgently needed to overcome my ignorance and anxiety in such a toxic time.
Desp
The Joy of Gay Sex
Dr. Charles Silverstein and Felice Picano
Paperback, 2003 (Third Edition)
We are back in the world of banned books, and because of that, I need to preface this review with the following – I am neither gay nor a man. I was, however, on the board of directors (and a founder) of a GLBT outreach and have many same-sex attracted friends and family members. So I am going to review this one anyway.
The first edition of the book was written in the late 70s, back when being queer was taboo and existed in the seedy underworld of America, hidden in back alleys and great cities, where people hid gayness and had homosexual sex like it was a fetish.
According to the prologue, the author (Dr. Silverstein with the assist of somebody else) had intended a book made up of encyclopedia entries, blowjob erotica and sketches of men in the middle of whatever. By the time the censorship was over, they had a dry, textbook of a book. The anectdote of a little vintage lady who confused The Joy of Gay Sex with The Joy of Cooking was especially funny.
This book has, supposedly, been expanded and updated since then. My problem with it is that the book is still geared towards that seedy underside of 70s