Hot Blooded
2020-12-05 18:10:15.951124+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
On a HAI message board, Karin Grace Wares mentioned her memoir, Hot Blooded: A Sexual Resurrection. I ordered it from Copperfield's, and quite enjoyed it.
One of the things that COVID-19 has made me aware of is how much of our sexual attitudes are a product of our times. I'm watching at how my various older gay friends are reacting to COVID-19, and it's amazing how much their experiences with having survived the AIDS epidemic has informed their behavior and attitudes now, and how there have been mentions of some sex parties that a younger generation were willing to attend, probably because they hadn't had that trauma deeply ingrained.
And as I sort through some of my own sexual traumas, I'm realizing that some of them come from the fact that my parents, and upbringing, were more Silent Generation than Baby Boomer, so I'm kind-of in a limbo that's between Boomer and Gen-X, with the additional cultural confusion that comes from extremely rural, Waldorf, and whatever set of neurological differences I carry.
When Charlene and I met, in a hot tub at a neo-tantra community event at a mansion in Tiburon, we talked about not being exclusive, but in practice that's never happened; I just don't have the spoons to have secondary relationships (which speaks to some of my own relationship traumas). However, I do listen to a number of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy podcasts, because those are the folks who are talking about personal growth and human relationships in terms that make sense to me.
But in listening to those folks, most of them are at least a decade younger than I am, if not more, and the generational differences in what sex means, and how they approach relationships, are clear. There's a huge difference in a generation that has access to "they/them" pronouns, to the one for which "ethical non-monogamy" wasn't a new concept, but was a new term.
As I read through Hot Blooded, I kept running across footnotes from books on my sex and sexuality bookshelf. This speaks a lot to my generation, echoing a lot of what I found in the writings of Susie Bright, and Carol Queen, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. Within the first few pages I found myself dropping quotes on social media, and as I got deeper into the book the observations got no less pithy, but built on previous thoughts so that they were no longer so easily excisable from context.
As she goes through her own journey, and likens that to what was happening in the culture around, I had the warm familiarity of the thoughts of my generation, contrasted with some wonderful insights and experiences probing the edges and frontiers of the time.
I think I may have to read this one again, and take stronger notes this time. Recommended.