Erik A. Sanjuro: Erik A. Sanjuro is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Southern California. His specialty areas are in American Government and Political Communication.
Love them or hate them, there is no denying that the 1970s were the height of sexual liberation for gay and lesbian Americans. This was especially true in New York City, the setting for Brad Gooch's shocking novel THE GOLDEN AGE OF PROMISCUITY.
The book, which spans almost the entire decade of the 1970s, revolves around a Columbia film student dropout named Sean Devlin. Sean is more of a plot device than a real character. He is very poorly developed as a character, even though he is the main focus of all 300 pages. It appear that Sean's main purpose in the novel is to allow the author to show the reader as many of the various personas that made up Greenwich Village and other gay hot spots as possible.
Sean can be easily described as uninhibited curiosity. Nothing he sees ever affects him, no matter how disturbing. For reasons unknown even to himself, Sean delves deeper and deeper into the darker side of New York gay subculture as the novel progresses. This is interesting from a historical point of view, as it presents dozens of unique portraits of what Gooch imagines Manhattan might have been like in the “golden age.”
For the most part, the author strays away from any sort of in-depth analysis of his characters' psyches. Mostly, what he writes are superficial descriptions of the most bizarre sorts of people that you might find were you to timewarp back to the disco era.
Some of the graphic depictions witnessed by Sean are quite shocking. He frequents leather bars, where all sorts of sadomasochistic sex play occurs, including fisting and water sports. Sean also attends bath houses and has an interesting career as an amateur movie pornographer. Sean's sex life is equally strange, from today's standards. He has dozens of partners throughout the book, each with unique fetishes and worldviews. The entire novel is focused on the sex lives of Sean and the people who occupy his world. As a result, it is impossible not to wonder what happened to people like Sean come the arrival of AIDS.
The most interesting section of this book, in the reviewer's opinion, has little to do with sex. Gooch's description of a typical night at Studio 54 is fascinating from a historical point of view. Pictures and songs can only go so far in recording a way of life. Fiction is perhaps the best way of piecing together the many diverse experiences that went into making an era what it was. In the case of that infamous night club, Gooch is able to effectively demonstrate what it might have been like to snort a line of cocaine with a group of disco whores and boogy with Elton John and Andy Warhol.
Unfortunately, the rest of his novel reads more like sophomoric pornography than quality fiction. Gooch appears addicted to using meaningless metaphors and employing fantastic, unrealistic conversation instead of properly developing his characters. As a result of Sean's failure to feel any type of emotion, or even to adequately rationalize his actions, the reader winds up not caring much about the proceedings.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PROMISCUITY is true to its title in that it is primarily concerned with sex. It specifically explores the sex lives of a specific segment of the generation that grew up in the 1970s. As a study of sex clubs and the range of sexual practices carried out during the decade, it is educational. It fails completely, however as a novel trying to entertain the reader.
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