Letters to the The Observer

Celebrating the film Shortbus

The Observer Review 3 December 2006

Doc. No. 2006.041 OBS003L

Tim Adams (Sex: Everybody’s doing it, 26 November 2006), says John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus is a little sexual revolution. I call it a big one – with its honest couplings welcome as an alternative to crude slam-bam porn or the sex-is-violent-and-doomed productions with their desperate self-loathing.

[This cheerful sexual honesty is what I argued for in my book The Sex Code: Morals for Moderns (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991). That described what I call the Henry Moore syndrome, an empty hole being placed where the sexual organs should be. It is wonderful that the hole is now at last being filled in.]

(Passage in square brackets omitted).