Most of the events described in these stories happened before AIDS arrived to affect all our sexual activities. In a year or two they may seem to belong to a golden time that can never return, but that would be to ignore both biology and history.
Plagues have come and gone before: there will always be some immune individuals to maintain the genetic line. And the virus is said to change so fast no vaccine will be able to be made in time (the same applies to the common cold). Well, it may change for the `better’. It may become attenuated so more and more people become resistant, and do not succumb to the presence of the virus in their blood. It may go the other way, and mutate to a more easily distributed form - which may be what is happening in Africa.
Historically, we may note that every few decades there is a period of licentiousness followed by a puritanical backlash - the gay ‘nineties, the flirtatious ‘twenties, the swinging ‘sixties. We can expect the turn of the century to bring another period of licentiousness. Celibates - stock up with condoms now: they’ll cost a fortune (taxed more than whisky, but obligatory) by 2010 when it’ll be all right to fuck again.
If it’s not all right, it will only mean that the mid-twentieth century protection we had from sexually transmitted diseases was a very temporary respite in the millions of years humans have been at it. In other words it has never been all right to fuck around. It has always been hazardous: if not the bludgeon or shotgun of the angry husband, parent, or rival, then the knife or poison of a wronged woman. Maybe the restraints of religions have more purpose than simple control of workers and peasants after all.
We felt for a time, those of us who enjoyed the swinging sixties, that we led charmed lives. If you did get the clap it was treatable with a single dose of sulphonamides or antibiotics. If you were unfaithful so was everyone else (like everyone always has been) but it was accepted, indeed almost compulsory. The relapse of acknowledged moral standards, as opposed to actual behaviour, after the second world war took longer to develop, because of the prolonged period of austerity, than it did after the first. Of course mainland Britain was not damaged in the fighting, unlike the aerial attacks of the Blitz in the forties. But is it true that more people died in the 1919 global influenza epidemic than were killed fighting in WW1? That was a plague to reckon with, and you don’t hear it mentioned these days. There was nothing you could do about it; it spread like wildfire; you were either dead in three or four days, or were recovering; people were dropping in the streets.
These comments apply to the overt expressions of sexuality - the male-oriented view of relations between men and women. But of course it’s not just the fucking that’s dangerous: becoming intimate in all its other senses is equally hazardous. Friendship, familial relationships, love affairs all have their obligations which are ignored at your peril. Isolation to avoid these obligations is difficult: your options vary from wilderness survivor (tramp, hermit, Brahmin) to billionaire recluse (paranoid, fascist, born-again). You have to give up money altogether or make so much it becomes irrelevant. Whichever route you go you’ll end up in the same place. The circle will be closed.
The stories in this book vary from accounts of travels that really occurred to fictitious episodes of human interaction. They all involve relationships with a sexual component. Some even invoke love in one or more of its many manifestations. Most names, locations, and jobs have been changed to protect the less-guilty, but nearly all the events have been personally experienced. That doesn’t mean that memory is accurate, nor that viewpoints are not invented. Does it matter? The aim is to entertain and, perhaps, illuminate the murkier regions of the male heterosexual psyche - a pretty much ignored subject these days.
The female heterosexual psyche also gets a bit of an airing: one long sequence comprises extracts from letters written by Eva Johansen during the months immediately preceding her untimely and accidental (but drunkenly careless) death in the early ‘eighties, which brought to an end the stormy relationship I had had with her since 1970. I found the carbon copies among her papers, and I have presumed to edit them, both in memoriam and to counterpoint my experiences and writings which have been so affected by her.
Mediocrity is the condition of most of us, by definition, This book is for mediocrats by mediocrats. The highly successful and the spectacularly disastrous: avoid it. The callow, shallow, superficial, meretricious no-hopers: enjoy. This, after all, is the genuine human condition. Which brings us back, via history and biology, to awareness of the shortness and impermanence of our individual existences. Wherever you be, let your pretensions blow free.