Sexplosion began as one of those decades books.
I’d worked as entertainment editor of Penthouse magazine for most of the 1970s, when publications like Penthouse and Playboy were each selling well over five million copies a month. It seemed like the sex life of America had exploded back then, and there were plenty of bestselling novels, manuals, movies, magazines, Broadway shows, and other cultural artifacts to support that hyperbole. If the 1980s were truly greedy and the 1920s actually roared, it seemed to me, in retrospect, that the 1970s were genuinely oversexed—and that this might warrant closer inspection in terms of its impact on our culture as a whole.
After visiting a few libraries to scour the microfilm files, and interviewing several writers, directors, actors, and producers, I was surprised to discover that research served me much better than memory. As a result, I decided instead to write about a slightly earlier period of history, one that did not conform nicely to any one decade but rather awkwardly straddled a couple of them. The years 1968 to 1973 coincided with what were my college years, as well as a whole generation of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ rollers who were the ideal audience for such seminal works as Hair, Midnight Cowboy, Myra Breckinridge, Performance, Portnoy’s Complaint, and many others.
Artists have been breaking sex taboos from the beginning of time, but probably no greater number of those totems to repression were smashed than in the year 1968. It was a veritable sexual explosion that continued and only slightly abated for the next four years, before repetition and exploitation diluted the creative pool. My college-age fantasy conjured up a world in which the writers and makers of everything from The Boys in the Band to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice were somehow connected and actually formed a community. Writing this book, I was delighted to learn how true my youthful conjectures were and, better yet, how current and genuinely adult most of those artists’ creative output during that time remains nearly half a century later.
Sexplosion is the story of how a number of very talented, risk-taking rebels challenged the world’s prevailing attitudes toward sex, and, in the process, changed pop culture forever.