The Red Thread of Passion

Blending memoir with literary and journalistic profiles, Guy (The Autobiography of My Body) explores how a range of liberated people have understood the connection between sexuality and spirituality. According to Guy, sex, misused and misunderstood, can be little more than an addictive and ultimately disappointing escape from anxiety. Yet, through interviews and examples from literature, Guy affirms that sexual energy is sacred and that the pursuit of sexual understanding and liberation is an inextricable part of spiritual realization. Offering brief biographies of Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence, Guy points up the intriguing contrast between their expansive views and the often tortured unfulfillment of their sex lives. Biographies of Zen student Alan Watts and writer Marco Vassi follow. Guy devotes the second half of the book to profiles of contemporary sexual healers, including the writer Carol Queen, a former stripper and lesbian activist who now lives with a man; Judith Anderson, a former porn star; and the Jesuit-trained Joseph Kramer, bright, ebullient and gay, who has synthesized Tantric, Taoist and Western theories about sexual energy into the Body Electric School of Erotic Massage. He also interviews Collin Brown and Selah Martha, the couple who now runs the tribal, freely sensual Body Electric workshops originated by Kramer. The book as a whole is phallocentric, but Guy is persuasive in demonstrating how important sex can be, for all, when we stop trying ""to make personal and private the primal energy of the universe."" (May)