And as it turned out, it only added to his reputation. He questioned at the time-and he’s written about this-whether the book was the right thing to do.īut he needed to pay his rent. The two of us, you know, we were a great team. I said, “I’d be happy to write it, but I don’t think I can do it alone.” I told them I needed a co-writer and they choose Edmund White. And there simply weren’t very many openly gay psychologists at the time, so I was a natural for them to come to. The editor in New York had enlisted me to write a book called the Parent’s Guide to Homosexuality, so he knew about me. I had been out for years, I was a director of a gay counseling center.
The publishers of The Joy of Sex made a killing financially and, since some of them were gay-and they all had dollar signs for eyeballs-they thought that they might make the same amount of money publishing a book for gays.Īlthough Alex Comfort, who wrote the Joy of Sex, was against the idea of this being written. What made you decide to write The Joy of Gay Sex?
I spoke with Silverstein in his Upper West Side apartment (the same one he wrote Joy in) about how this groundbreaking tome came together and what its legacy is for future generations of gay men.
