Michael Leigh - The Velvet Underground

One

Sexology is not my field. I am a writer, a former editor and columnist, who has traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Central America.

On the other hand, most males and some females, consciously or unconsciously, are curious as to what makes us function biologically. And to these ranks I belong. Also, besides seeing the average amount of pornography, I have read seriously in the sexological field.

It is because I am not an expert in this area that this report is significant. I am the fellow next door, perhaps a little more curious, a little more probing, but that is all.

My subjects did not come to me for therapeutic aid. I did not set out to research them, although, eventually, that is what I succeeded in doing. My subjects may have been sick, but they were more than satisfied with their sickness and went to extraordinary lengths to maintain it even worsen it!

Most of my subjects are married and both husbands and wives are cognizant of each other's wishes. In these mutual endeavors toward variety they receive assistance from other, similarly disposed couples, as well as from single people of both sexes. They form both loosely linked associations with other couples to satisfy their desires, and clubs that cater to every conceivable sexual need.

Adult couples of all ages are included, as are people in all walks of life, for the well-educated professional man holds one thing in common with the semiliterate manual worker: the desire and willingness to share and find satisfaction in sex. It should be emphasized that these people are not the rag, tag and bobtail of society. They are not the so-called dead beats, the alleged beatniks or what used to be called Bohemians.

They live orderly, well-regulated lives. They are churchgoers of all denominations. In most cases they have children. They are not drinkers except in the social sense, and many of them do not drink at all. With few exceptions, they either hold prestige jobs, own businesses or are in the professions. They include architects, nurses, dentists, attorneys, ranchers, realtors, movie actors, models, writers, farmers, engineers, photographers, storeowners, chemists, druggists, government employees, servicemen, business executives and politicians. None of them run bars or night clubs. They are not in occupations where loose sexual contacts might be expected. To the casual observer, they are respected and respectable members of their communities.

In the main, these are the things they are not: they are not noisy and loud; they do not give parties where the drinking is heavy; they do not indulge in suggestive talk or off-color jokes at the store or office, much less in the home.

The women are model wives, excellent housewives and exemplary mothers; the men are model husbands, better than usual providers and highly rated fathers.

You will never read about them in the pages of a Mantegazza, Krafft-Ebing or Kinsey, or in the works of the Kronhausens. They themselves, however, will have read these authors, and such writers as Freud, Mead, Loth, de Beauvoir and Fuchs. They will also have read portions of The Oxford Professor, under the title of The Sixty Niner, smuggled into this country from the Erotikan Press, Paris, as well as pornographic classics such as Memories of a Hotel Man, and Linda's Strange Vacation. The informed will have succeeded in begging, borrowing or stealing a copy of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. According to their own testimony, they have read and passed on to friends all the pornography that unremitting effort and persistence can obtain.

The two Hollywood cases not too long ago, involving well-known film and television personalities, might make it appear the activities that were exposed are confined to this particular segment of society. This is not so. People with no intellectual or artistic pretensions whatever similarly divert themselves. According to the evidence supplied by them, there is no deviation or perversion they do not practice or seek to practice.

Let me reiterate that these facts could not be obtained in the usual way. According to the reports, prostitutes allow themselves to be interviewed by scientists, and the mentally and sexually sick at all levels of society may be analyzed by experts, but how is the allegedly normal person to be questioned? What would be the result if someone knocked on the door and asked the average housewife if she and her husband believed in extramarital sex? Or if they were bisexual? Even if the questions were asked during medical checkups would they be answered truthfully? Would they be answered at all?

Then how were such questions asked?

It started when I answered an advertisement in a magazine available to every man and woman in the United States.

On the night I came upon the advertisement, I was tired physically and mentally. I went out for relaxation and saw some magazines in the lobby of a hotel. I leafed idly through them, and then decided to examine them more closely. The advertisement appeared in the end pages of a magazine I had seen, though had never purchased, on newsstands, and immediately it intrigued me.

According to the ad, a new and unusual friendship club had been formed for unusual people. Members were great travelers from all over the world and from all walks of life. They wanted to exchange strange experiences and discuss the bizarre and the exotic with others. They were adventurous, uninhibited, broad-minded, intellectual and cultured.

I checked at the time and have rechecked frequently since. The magazine still appears regularly on newsstands; the advertisement is still carried, though at irregular intervals.

I had some idea that I might contact, for example, a Turkish national and then, were I to visit Istanbul again, my acquaintance with him and my knowledge of his home life and his family would enable me to know Turkey. Or perhaps the contact might be an Athenian, a Cairene or a Roman. It would be wonderful, really, to know Rome instead of merely knowing the location of the Spanish Steps, the Forum and the Vatican Museum. Also, I wondered what was meant by the bizarre and exotic.

I replied to the advertisement, sending the required fee and submitting a bare minimum of information, including the fact that I was married. Then I waited for developments. Over the next few days I thought at intervals about the stupid thing I had done, and then I forgot all about as the one I answered insist that all letters sent through them to new members must be unsealed in order that the contents may be examined to ensure that nothing objectionable is sent through the mails. Naturally, also, there is a fee for this service.

Perhaps this is simply a way of staying within the law while still catering to a special trade but, at the same time, it is a strictly enforced rule. It's difficult to understand how such letters got through short of what must have been criminal carelessness on someone's part. That carelessness resulted in this investigation.

Because I scented an expose, I mentioned the club and the letters during a long-distance telephone conversation concerning my work. There was immediate interest, and I was asked to fill in more thoroughly by mail. I did so and within a short time I received an assignment for a book about these clubs.

Even then, short of answering the letters myself, which I did not intend to do, there appeared to be no way of investigating. I was stymied until I made contact with a young couple who, while sexually loose-living, did not party with others even though they knew many couples who did. Since they lived on the fringe of the sexual underworld, they were instrumental in getting me on the inside. Mistaking my motives, they gave me full cooperation, sent me material and volunteered many other contacts.