Kevin Howell

Worst...Book...Ever: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
September 13, 2007

Try as I might to stay out of the tabloid muck that has infested general news coverage (will the rainforests ever recover from Britney at the VMAs or the Howard-Larry-Anna Nicole triangle?), there was one scandal that piqued my interest: Senator Larry Craig getting busted in a bathroom stall.

What has stuck in my head is the idea (swallowed without question by the media) that there’s some secret soft-shoe routine that guys do when they’re cruising for sex. The first and only time I’ve ever heard about this technique was in Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. This 1969 book sold more than 100,000 copies and is so chock-full of misinformation that its almost surprising that the reading portion of the human race was still able to reproduce after the then-36-year old Reuben explained things.

If ever a book deserved to go out of print, this is it. Its just too bad that impressionable minds can still buy used copies. I guess that’s where Larry Craig found out about foot-tapping in restrooms. Reuben illustrates his Q&A book with lots of anonymous sources telling their sordid tales so he doesn’t have to admit to doing anything himself. A nameless homosexual tells Reubens (on page 183 of the Bantam paperback) about sitting in a bathroom stall: “I watch his feet. If he’s a gay guy, he’ll slide his foot over and kind of nudge mine. That means he’s “cruising.” If I’m interested, I nudge back. Then we get started.”

At the time, Reubens painted a pretty bleak pictures of the male homosexual. The most optimistic passage states, “If a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.” (pg. 162)

And, with Reubens as a tour guide, who would want to be gay? Sex between men in bed is brief: “Three to five minutes should be enough for the entire operation.” (pg. 163). Maybe that’s why Reubens thinks that gay men “have as many as five sexual experiences in one evening—all with different partners. He rarely knows their names—he is unlikely to see any of them again. Besides, few homosexuals use their real names. They generally go by aliases, choosing first names with a sexual connotation. Harry, Dick, Peter are the most favored.” (pg. 164).

He also has the unusual idea that when two men want more than mutual masturbation, they have to purchase a $20 mail order artificial vagina which is “built into a pair of flesh-colored nylon stretch panties—one size fits all.” (pg. 170).

This book came out six months after the Stonewall Riots and the birth of the gay liberation movement, so there was not a lot of enlightened thinking about gay issues. But Reubens seems intentionally pessimistic: “[Homosexuals] say they want sexual gratification and love but they eliminate, right from the start, the most obvious source of love and gratification—woman. He is the sexual Diogenes, always looking for the penis that pleases. That is the reason he must change partners endlessly. He tries each phallus in succession, then turns away remorsefully. “No, that’s not the one!” He is in a difficult position—condemned eternally to search after what does not exists—after what never existed.” (pg. 176)

“What about all the homosexuals who live together happily for years?” asks Reuben’s fictional call to his responses. “What about them?” he answers himself. “They are mighty rare birds among the homosexual flock. Moreover, the “happy” part remains to be seen. The bitterest argument between husband and wife is a passionate love sonnet by comparison with a dialogue between a butch and his queen. Live together? Yes. Happily? Hardly.” (pg 177)

Supposedly, Queen Victoria didn’t believe that there were such things as lesbians. Reuben hadn’t advanced much further. He devotes two whole pages to lesbians in his 433-page book. I’m not sure if its meant to entice or deter picking up hookers, but Reubens assures readers that “the majority of prostitutes are female homosexuals in their private lives…” (pg. 269) He concludes that “basically all homosexuals are alike—looking for love where there can be no love and looking for sexual satisfaction where there can be no satisfaction.”  

Published 18 years after Christine Jorgensen’s sex change operation made international headlines, Reubens has no patience for what we currently call sexual reassignment surgery. “These are the men who claim to have been changed into women. They are actually castrated and mutilated female impersonators,” assures the doctor (pg. 186). He ends this brief section on transsexuals (a term not found in this book) with a dire anecdote: “Recently, in England, two homosexuals who had undergone their operations five years previously died of cancer. Ironically they succumbed to cancer of the breast—their new female breast. Ironically, these men who wanted to be women died of a woman’s disease. That’s as close as they came.”

I guess if Senator Craig did read Reuben’s book, it may help explain his vehemently anti-gay voting record. 

Posted by Kevin Howell on September 13, 2007 | Comments (9)