What Wild Ecstasy; The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Patty Carroll (Jacket photograph) and Pat Heidenry. 448 pages. Sources. Index. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. From the former editor of Penthouse Forum comes a detailed exploration of the sexual revolution and its issues, including the works of Masters and Johnson, Deep Throat, controversy over freedom of expression, and the rights of gays and lesbians. John Heidenry (born May 15, 1939) is an American author and editor. After a two-year stint as a reporter for the St. Louis Review, he moved to New York, where he worked as managing editor of Herder and Herder, a major publisher of theology and philosophy. Heidenry became the founding editor of both St. Louis magazine and the St. Louis Literary Supplement. Returning to New York again, Heidenry worked as editor of Penthouse Forum, interim editor of Maxim magazine, and executive editor of The Week. He also wrote four books: Theirs Was The Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace & the Story of the Reader's Digest, What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution, The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series-and America's Heart-During the Great Depression, Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease, and co-authored, with Brett Topel, The Boys Who Were Left Behind: The 1944 World Series between the Hapless St. Louis Browns and the Legendary St. Louis Cardinals. In 1998 the Institute for Advanced Study in Human Sexuality (IASHS) in San Francisco awarded Heidenry an honorary degree for his history of human sexuality. Some of the topics covered include: Orgasm, Sexology, Linda Montano, AIDS/HIV, Pornography, Birth Control, Censorship, Sexual Abuse, Extramarital, Bob Guccione, Fellatio, Larry Flint, First Amendment, Gender Identity, Gay Rights, Lesbian Rights, Hugh Hefner, Homosexuality, Masters and Johnson, Kinsey, Linda Lovelace, Promiscuity, Prostitution, Sadomaschism, Reuben Sturman, Marco Vassi, Ferdinand D'Acugno, Transsexualism, and the Women's Movement Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Exhausting, colorful, and entertaining, this history of American sexual behavior from the Kinsey Report to the AIDS epidemic bears a message spelled out on the last page: "Sex is morally neutral. No one sexual group has any claim to the moral high ground, nor has it any business regulating the consensual adult sexual behavior of any other group." To former Penthouse Forum editor Heidenry, the sexual liberation of the 1960s and '70s is part of a "permanent sexual revolution" destined to sweep the globe. Battle-scarred veterans of the porn wars--Larry Flynt, Maurice Girodias, Al Goldstein, Ralph Ginzburg--as well as sexologists such as John Money, Masters and Johnson and Shere Hite are the prime movers in a chronicle that gives equal weight to magazine pornography, swingers' clubs, flesh films and sexual minorities, all these phenomena were part of a great sexual awakening. This is a highly informative survey filled with revealing intimate profiles (of, among others, Germaine Greer, Gay Talese and Hugh Hefner) and notable for its strong opposition to homophobia and its fair-minded analysis of gay and lesbian issues.