Too Much Sex

The following is a review of my memoir posted by a customer on Amazon:
“Absolutely disgusting! It was an autobiography written by a neighbor who has written
many books. I'm sure this was the worst one. I can hardly face him now.
Hard to believe people lived lives like that. Don't bother reading or even
selling it.”  Well, I have to say I told her when she inquired at the time of its being  published that it was probably not the book for her at eighty seven years of age.  And I have to say that in the introductory chapter I put in a warning coupled with disclaimer when I said that there might be more descriptions of sex than the reader wanted, but that I wanted to make it clear what a young gay male back in the forties grew into.  In looking back over my life what was obviously the most remarkable, I guess, was that out of the blue, when I was twenty one I met a fellow student at the university and one hour later asked her to marry me, which she agreed to do even though she knew at the time that my sexual history was entirely with males. And so on and so forth, ending in a second marriage and four children.  But what I did not quite get across was that no boy in 1945 in small town Iowa had the vaguest idea what was happening when he suddenly felt a powerful attraction to the boys around him.  My mother, the Edwardian belle, was forever telling my older brother: “Don’t kiss a girl unless you are engaged to her.”  She told my sisters to keep themselves pure, and she was only thinking about extensive necking! All the boy-girl movies of the era showed soft focus flirtation, moving into sweet kissing, shared sodas at the local ice cream parlor; I knew all I needed to know about all that, but was not ready for the sudden overwhelming rush of desire for another boy. But I looked at a boy with an erection in the shower at Andover, he suggested doing something about it, and I did, and that was the beginning of a long time experimenting, trying to find where the social role for my heavy panting and frequent orgasms was to be found.  There was no template in those days, and the memoir is among other things an interesting (at least I think so!) account of wandering through the valley of temptation and surrendering every time because there was no objection nor rule against it.  About twenty years ago when I was a director of a graduate program I had to interview each of the new students. I well remember my personal shock when I casually asked a young fellow from California how he was getting along so far from home, the usual baloney, to which he replied quite casually, that he was very much settled in, and indeed had started to date a fine fellow who was also in the graduate school. I who was a veteran of more homosexual encounters that I could positively count up, was shocked, really, truly, not like Captain Renault speaking to Rick in Casablanca, but truly so, at first that he could simply say such a thing, and then that he was without an agenda, that it just seemed like a perfectly normal thing to say.  And there you see, Gentle Reader, the difference between my youth and this young man, and why or partly why my story to be told at all had to have those erotic details.  Now I just have to figure out how to make this clear to my neighbor when next I see her this winter.  Lucky thing is her memory being what it is the chance of her remembering having read the memoir is doubtful.