On Writing a Sexual Memoir

At eighty, I have reached an age where many of my peers no longer can or wish to remember their past. Instead, they focus on their day-by-day existence and, thereby, on the miseries of the unavoidable afflictions of old age. Being no longer young, fit, desired, etc., etc., etc., their continuing existence becomes defined by what has been lost.

I, in contrast, have chosen not to forget. I will not surrender the precious and intriguing memories of my past, of what I became, was and, therefore, still am. I will not allow my mind to mirror my aging body's debilitation and obsess about things I cannot change. I believe that one can make the remaining years of one's life into a period of renewal and liberation.

I have led, to all appearances, an interestingly disordered but overall successful and respectable life. It leaves me with much to remember. In doing so, there is much to enjoy and little to regret.

However, I have left much that happened throughout my life and that I have done, if not denied, unexamined. This applied, not surprisingly, foremost to my sexual relations with partners who mattered to me then and still do so now. It's time now to bring this and that into the open. It will also be invigorating to revisit these well past sexual experiences. I expect to find out that the solitude of age can sharpen one's appreciation of remembered experiences. It may well whet my emotions once again to a keener sense!

More than a year ago, with an incomplete sentence, my progress in giving an honest account of my life came to a halt. I was writing about my polio-attack when I was seven, about what occurred, how and to what extent it crippled me and how I had to adjust.

Thinking about how much Polio may have been a critical formative influence on my character, how I related to others and they to me throughout my life as an adult, brought my writing to a sudden stop. It was more than a short-time writer's block. I suddenly realised how rarely and how superficially I had thought about this. Had I blocked it out? I found the task of describing it in a few paragraphs or even pages threateningly uncomfortable. Instead of thinking it out and progressing with a conventional retelling of my life, I stopped in my track.

As a short term, an entertaining diversion, I started to busy myself writing a light-hearted, sexual memoir. It was not only a sense of playful mischief that attracted me to make sex the leading theme of the anecdotal recollections. As an avid reader, I had long-held, critical misgivings about the extent and nature of censorship that were either externally prescribed or voluntarily adopted in 'respectable' literature.

Especially in biographies and memoirs, a prissy restraint in describing the actors' sexuality and their sexual relations both falsify the account and leaves it incomplete. A recent reading of the acclaimed biography of the Roosevelts - Hazel Rowley's, Franklin and Eleanore: An Extraordinary Marriage - had sharpened my disaffection anew. It is a biography that tip-toes around the centrality of sex for both of its characters.

I decided, therefore, to be deliberately 'naughty'. I planned to ignore all priggish constraints in using language and describing in detail and length the physicality of sex in action.

By itself, this would have been neither original nor rare; it is a characteristic of pornographic/erotic literature.

However, as I had chosen Complexities as the working-title, I knew from the beginning that my memoir would turn into more than just a sequence of risqué, pornographic anecdotes. My partners and I were always more than just sexual actors. Our sexuality was, in our actions, never all. Our sex was sometimes in concordance but as often in contradiction of our everyday personality and circumstances. In contrast to most literary erotica, I would not present the sexual happenings as extraneous and unrelated to my partners' and my concurrent and past life. Neither did I want to exclude the inherent or arising moral and emotional complexities. I planned to be truthful.

It became a continuous challenge to read something that I had written on the screen, and realising that it was either less or often more than the truth.

By believing that such a memoir offered a light-hearted diversion from thinking about and exposing myself, I was hoisted by my own petard. As the 'story' progressed, it revealed more and more about my character, its weaknesses and strength in the context of myself as a sexual actor.

Among other things, it made me realise that I never was, in my relationship with women, a sexually dominant 'alpha' male. I had mixed feelings about that. Was it good or bad? Was the reason for this possible lack in manliness that I was always conscious of my polio-induced disabilities?

In retrospect, writing about my so happily remembered rich and rewarding sexual experiences made me realise anew that I was fortunate. I became aware of the oneness between my sexual and my social being and that I had suffered no discrimination, as either one or the other. And it demonstrably was not that others - out of a prescribed tolerance - 'overlooked' my, to me, so apparent short-comings and disabilities. Lovers, friends, acquaintances, and strangers just did not see me the way I saw myself. It was a paradox that in their eyes, I must have seemed whole and attractive. At the same time, I saw myself, as in the Hall of Mirrors in Luna Park, often as maimed and irredeemably flawed.

My sexual experiences were, therefore, for me much more than pleasant, exciting diversions. In the reflecting mirror of my lovers' eyes, I saw myself as desired and attractive. Equally important, in the physicality of love-making, I found myself unhindered whole. Call it self-love, but these sexual encounters were, all of them, love-affairs that had meaning far beyond the brief, physical satisfaction. They enriched me by what my partners saw in me and by the purity of their sexual desire as it matched mine. It was unsullied by material interests - I was never rich - or the pity of a charitable frame of mind.

In looking for a more suggestive title than Complexities for the completed memoirs, I settled on The Sirens' Song. It alludes to another voyager. Unlike me, Odysseus was a hero-warrior, an alpha male. On his long journey home after the slaughter and laying waste to Troy over the ownership of a woman, he sailed past the Sirens' island inviting shore. Unlike his warrior-companions, who had blocked their ears with wax, Odysseus had himself tied to the mast to listen to the Sirens' seductive song. Tied down, he could not be drawn into their web of a freely chosen, life-affirming, sexual fulfilment. For his maleness, it would have been an unacceptable surrender. He left the story of what the Sirens song meant for this traveller to tell. He had listened and learned much by stepping ashore on the sirens' isle.

The self-appointed moral guardians will judge the following chapters as evidence of an abhorrent addiction. I can only admit that I have always been sexually attracted to women and that it has enjoyably enriched my life. How much this has been and is still the case, I am discovering anew in writing about it.

Having completed this memoir, I am uncertain whether I would want it read by others, much less published. At the moment, I believe that it will remain unread in my computer's memory to be - with it - discarded by my heirs.

Even if one writes exclusively for oneself, one does so for an imagined reader. If she or he is to understand what one needs to say, the writing must be clear: Most importantly, it must be honest, must not distort, distract-from, or prettify what needs to be said. As I write about sex and sexual experiences, I use an explicit language that shocks prissy readers.

For this, I offer no apology. I genuinely believe the problem lays with them, not me. For my imagined ideal reader and me, the libido is not a psychosis that justifies the suppression of sexuality and its language. And, as this memoir illustrates, I still don't find, at eighty years of age, sex too unimportant and uninteresting to write about. The censure of sexually repressed or supposedly uninterested people, will not influence me in what and how I write.

In the first dozen chapters, I learned that I was not the unassailed master over what I had planned. It should not have surprised me that my stories, in getting written, became an alternative reality that asserted their own life and momentum.

Firstly, they resisted being cut short and spare in what I was telling. This, I must admit, I welcomed. Writing about my well-past sexual experience made me greedy to relive its exhilarating joy.

Secondly and, perhaps, more mystifying was that even while writing explicitly about pure sex, an aura of hidden meanings began to hover over the carnally remembered. It arose, even when the sexual relation I described was opportunistic and brief. There was always an undercurrent of unvoiced needs and growing affection, combined with reservations, doubts, and the reality of hurting.

In remembering and writing it down, it felt as strong - and as resistant to capture its meaning in words - as it must have been then. The unsaid was thereby always part of the story.