How Alex Comfort Discovered the “Joy of Sex”
In 1972, Dr. Alex Comfort authored the international bestseller that revolutionized the ancient genre of the sex manual—the culmination of a quarter-century writing and advocating for greater sexual freedom. But his career encompassed much more, as a pioneering gerontologist and geriatrician, a poet, novelist, and critic, anarchist and pacifist, and one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals and controversialists of the postwar decades.How did it all fit together?Eric Laursen, author of the new biography Polymath, will explore the roots of Alex Comfort’s achievement, from social medicine and scientific positivism to the mystical poetry of William Blake and the speculations of the Renaissance alchemists to Vedic philosophy, quantum physics, and the “technology of the emotions.” All of these fields informed Comfort’s lifelong quest to fully understand the human. Along the way, we will trace the intersection of his anarchist politics and his radical new perspective on sexual identity and practice.
Bio:
Eric Laursen is a longtime activist, historian, and journalist, living in western Massachusetts. His previous books are The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Asocial Security Since Reagan (2012), The Duty to Stand Aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort (2018), and The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State (2021).
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Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
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