Not new and not about joy

Readers who hope to find in this book a how-to manual of gay sex will be very sadly disappointed. Rather it tries (unsuccessfully in my opinion) to be an "encyclopedic" reference from A to Z (with the emphasis on zzzzzz) on the "joyful" life of gay sex, and even then, the book turns out to be only alphabetized, not encyclopedic. Even on those terms it fails. E.g., how can a section about wills be part of the "joys". If anything, wills are a problem about being gay, and irrelevant to gay sex, joys or not. I would say that this book is not at all directed towards gays, who I'm sure will know much , much, much more about the subject than has been written here, but towards those who have a prurient interest, are mere gawkers, or who are timidly venturing towards it. If that is the case, none of these groups would be well-served by this book.The text is antiseptic, pedestrian, and boring, and the illustrations are grotesque, not to mention degrading.

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Bookshop 'Reading Room'

I found this book in a bookshop near my university, waited till other customers had moved on and took it from the shelf, reading it furtively, hoping noone would notice, but aroused by the illustrations. Later I had the same experience elsewhere with Gordon Merrick's 'Perfect Freedom', but then my book opened automatically to the juicy bits where other readers had been there before me,.......I suppose these are the well-thumbed copies booksellers could never move in the days when embarrassment made buying such books a heart-stopping experience, like buying condoms in a small town dispensary......the internet age has changed a lot.....the book is now just one of many, when once it was the one and only......so the memories make it more interesting than the content

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MAGNIFICANT ILLUSTRATIONS./ FOUND MYSELF

In the magnificant illustrations I "found myself" from memories of myself as an adolescent to acceptance of my adult self. The book is pre-AIDS and therefore its information is not up-to-date but the artistically erotic illustrations's communicate a "lovingness". Reading this book for the first time in the mid- 80's raised my homosexual energy from phallic to romantic. This book is for any gay who wants to feel eternally free.

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