No single event did more for open discussion of sex than the Kinsey Report, which got such matters as homosexuality, masturbation, coitus, and orgasm into most papers and family magazines. ​​​​
— Time Magazine, 1953
Too Darn Hot
​
Fiction, poetry, personal ads, sex manuals, the Bible, and more collected in this cultural anthology that chronicles sexual mores and culture in the latter twentieth century.
On January 5, 1948, a zoologist from Indiana published the results of his interviews with 5,300 men about their sex lives, and the earth moved. Americans were ready to throw off the covers and talk about sex.
​
Too Darn Hot celebrates the half century of writing since the first volume of this bombshell report and its companion based on interviews with women released five years later (to even more bombs!).
The anthology scans the literary imagination and cultural ramifications of a people shedding their puritan roots. It pairs personal ads and film scripts with well-known words from Audre Lord, John Updike, bell hooks, Diane di Prima, Philip Roth, and Dorothy Allison. It introduces new writers wrestling with the sexual revolutions of the sixties and seventies. And the devastating complexities of the AIDS pandemic. And the fallout from centuries of misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism. And the rise and fall and repurposing of pornography. In short, the book does what literature, whether found or furiously constructed, does best. ​​​​
​
Sanders edited the book with fellow writers Mary McGrail and Judy Bloomfield and what fun they had tracking down writers and artifacts. While the book is out of print, you can still find copies online and in used book stores. It's worth the hunt.
​​​​
