ON THE AIR since 1990, HBO’s documentary series Real Sex has proven to be hugely popular with millions of cable subscribers curious about the sexual practices and fantasies of their fellow Americans. Ostensibly unscripted and nonfictional, the series’ ring of authenticity adds to its appeal. …

THE GAY COMMUNITY has a long history of alcohol and drug abuse above the rate that occurs in the heterosexual population. Research suggests that gay men use drugs in specific situations, such as during sex or during visits to specific “homosocial” venues like bars, clubs, sex parties or bathhouses. Thus, for many gay men, a unique aspect of gay culture is that drug use is very often specifically connected to seeking or having sex. …

IT WAS over twenty years ago that a major sex study disclosed what was then a rather startling finding: lesbian couples engaged in sexual activity significantly less frequently than did both heterosexual and gay male couples …

… Conceptions of sex, after all, vary from one cultural epoch to the next, but also during the lifespan of an individual. The urge to reproduce is an arc, you might say, that rises into the sky, like a rainbow, and then returns to earth. Once it occurred to me to ask a friend who’d sired six children if this had lessened his sex drive, and it made no sense when he said No. …

IN THE LATE 1930’s, Alfred Kinsey had what he thought was a rather simple idea: given that no one had the slightest idea what people really did and did not do sexually, and given-as he discovered from a questionnaire he distributed to his students-that a lack of simple information about sex was causing massive confusion and heartache, why not do a survey that would provide some hard information about people’s sexual practices? Why not discuss the unmentionable and replace ignorance and myths about sex with information and education?

THE QUESTION of whether sex “is worth dying for” was posed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality and speaks directly to why, in the third decade of…More