Adult Lovemaking + Sunday Sex Sermon

America's discomfort and hypocrisy around the natural and lovely act of sex has beguiled me since I was a kid in Redding, California. I remember the moment well: My mother's friend had moved into town some months before to open a sex shop. The local churches rallied and in short order forced him out of town. On his way out, he dropped by and gifted me with my first television, a 13" Sony Trinitron, one that had been in use in one of his "viewing booths". I was eleven and didn't understand why people were so upset, but I knew they must be wrong because they were the same ones who picketed my mother when she dared to host a Dungeons & Dragons tournament at her mall. My thespian (if you have a thespian in your family, you understand why I deploy the adjective) mother, whose best friend was a madam and who married my father, a closeted homosexual, was angered by the town's small-mindedness. It's the ongoing prevalence of puritanical attitudes about sex that continues to mystify me.

I've worked at a seedy sex shop, organized a Sex Workers' Art Show at a performing arts theater I used to run (The Raven in Healdsburg), performed a public 'sex sermon' (image below), and ... as a birthday present to myself, engaged in this bit of absurdist public performance art. I have not retired the character of the "A-dult Lovemaker," so keep an eye out for an encore performance ... with special guests.