BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE – The Joy of Sex (12/10/2024)
The Joy of Sex was published in 1972 and for years, was rarely out of the bestseller lists, generating sequels, revised editions and a lot of imitators – so how could it be countercultural?
For two reasons – firstly that Dr Alex Comfort who wrote it was a deeply countercultural figure, and second, because its publication represents the moment when the sexual revolution of the countercultural years of the late ’50s and ‘60s, threw off its remaining clothes and burst naked into the bourgeous middle class mainstream.
And it changed a lot of peoples’ live – well their sex lives at any rate.
Social justice journalist activist and anarchist Eric Laursen, author of Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, came to The Bureau to tell of the poet, novelist, doctor, biologist, gerontologist, anarchist, scientific humanist, public intellectual, pacifist and activist who happened to write the world’s most famous guide to lovemaking.
