Francine Prose on the unfinished sexual revolution of the 1970s ‹ Literary Hub

In this era of so-called sexual liberation, it was illegal in Massachusetts to prescribe birth control to unmarried women. In college, I had lied to get the pill. I had made sure the doctor in Boston knew I was a doctor’s daughter. His office had family photos hanging around it, a wife, a son, and a daughter. I hoped he would see me as some kind of daughter and at least pretend to think I was married. He didn’t want his daughter to get pregnant out of wedlock. Abortion was a serious crime, and would remain so for several years to come. When my best friend became pregnant in high school, she had to go to Puerto Rico for an abortion, accompanied by her confused immigrant parents.

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None of us were sure what sex meant or didn’t mean. Was it a pastime or an obligation? How did you keep your heart from getting confused by your body? And what did any of this have to do with love, whatever that was? You slept with people you met at a dinner party, and the other guests stayed with mutual friends. One friend brought home a guy who lived in a cave that she’d picked up at a flea market in Orlando.

None of us were sure what sex meant and what it didn’t.

You didn’t expect sex to be anything more than it was. It could be transcendent. Or it couldn’t be. You pretended you had no expectations, even when you did. Sometimes you had sex with someone because it seemed easier than saying no, even though you knew the person would have been perfectly gracious if you had refused. Misunderstandings were common. Possessiveness and jealousy were embarrassingly old-fashioned. Monogamy was meant to be destroyed without breaking anyone’s heart, so why did Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell sing about heartbreak?

Sex was a political act, a part of freedom. I can’t remember ever hearing the tone I sometimes hear today when women describe their relationship to hookup culture: a mix of sexual boasting and puritanical self-loathing. We should be in control of our own sexuality. No one should make us feel guilty about it. We should be oblivious to the gap between what we should feel and what we felt. How many times have I written “should” in a passage about freedom.

In that time between the availability of the pill and AIDS, as long as you had contraception and protection against sexually transmitted diseases – and sometimes even without – you could have sex with other people just to see what it was like. A plague of sexually transmitted pubic lice was spreading among my friends in New York, revealing a web of secret connections.

This isn’t a boast about how young and hot we were. If youth was a requirement, attractiveness was rarely the requirement. It was secondary to excitement, curiosity, and desire. They learned that sex could be better than drugs, better than the best drug. On the other hand, sex could also be a really weird thing for people to do.

The day before my wedding, my future husband and I, along with his best friend – his best man – spent the afternoon at a movie theater in Manhattan watching the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey film. Chelsea Girls. When my future husband went out to buy popcorn, his friend and I were making out, and when he came back, his friend and I were holding hands in the dark. I told myself it didn’t mean anything. We had simply relieved the boredom of a three-and-a-half-hour black-and-white movie in which nothing happens except Bridget Berlin injects herself with speed. Did my husband have any idea what his friend and I had done? I never knew, but later I remembered that afternoon with guilt while reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel: The death of the heartThe flash of a lighter in a movie theater reveals that young Portia’s lover, a hustler named Eddie, is holding the woman’s hand on his other side.

My first night in San Francisco had been spent with my husband’s same friend, his former best man. He had moved west after college to work at a technology company. After that night together, my husband’s best friend was surprised that I was leaving to stay with my friends Henry and Grace. I was surprised that he thought I had traveled across the country to live with him. The conversation that cleared things up was painfully awkward, as such conversations always were, even though we had learned to talk casually and superficially about freedom, sex, and desire, even though we had learned to act as if our plans and intentions were the result of fleeting impulses or misunderstood signals.

On my second night in San Francisco, Henry and Grace asked me to go to the convenience store a few blocks down the hill to buy avocados. Everyone wanted guacamole. Everyone was high. It was midnight.

They’ve learned that sex can be better than drugs, better than the best drug. On the other hand, it can also seem really strange to people.

At Cala Foods, a heavenly neon light shone on the gorgeous California produce, the perfect artichokes and the museum-quality avocados. The only other customers were a half-dozen drag queens with full beards, feather boas, chest hair and satin dresses. They flitted around like butterflies, only louder, and caused the most drama as they stuffed family-size packs of corn candy into their shopping baskets.

I believed they were angels sent from heaven to tell me—trumpets sound—that I had traded darkness for light. Whoever these wonderful creatures were, they were not like my fellow students in Harvard’s English department. I felt dazzled, like Dorothy leaving black-and-white Kansas for a world remade in the rainbow pastels of a child’s breakfast cereal.

What were the chances of finding a perfectly ripe avocado? In Cambridge, zero. In San Francisco, apparently a hundred. I got tortilla chips in case Henry and Grace didn’t have any. I was just beginning to remember what it felt like to be normal and not afraid. The boy at the checkout could barely cash in my purchases, he was so enamored with the glitter and the dresses and wigs.

Back at the apartment, I learned that my fellow shoppers were celebrities: The Cockettes! An incredibly original theater group led by the inspired Hibiscus, the troupe performed in the Nocturnal Dream Show at the Pagoda Palace Theater and staged their crazy, hilarious plays: Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma! They had made a wonderful film, Tricia’s Weddingabout the Nixon daughter’s glorious moment in the White House, a cheerful drag queen who degenerates into orgiastic violence when Eartha Kitt spikes the punch with LSD.

A random Cockettes sighting on my first night in San Francisco! Everyone agreed it was a good sign. The guacamole was delicious and my hosts thanked me for remembering to buy chips.

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