Amid a Backdrop of Cultural Upheaval, Teens Equate Sex with Maturity
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Sex, in the hands of teenagers, can simultaneously define and destroy a still-maturing identity. In Sex, A Love Story, author Jerome Gold explores the complex role of sex in the lives of two high school seniors who use physical intimacy as a way of affirming their adulthood and establishing their individuality.
Set in Fullerton (Orange County), California, Sex, A Love Story takes place at the end of the Eisenhower era and the beginning of the Kennedy administration. The coming-of-age novel follows Bob and Jen, children of parents who entered the middle class after WWII. Life, for these kids, has not reached the level of affluence the professional class knows, and they are left to feel insecure about their futures. Will they find work? Go to college? Or enter the military?
At first a powerful antidote to their frustration and normal teen angst, sex between Jen and Bob takes on a life of its own and becomes a complex entity in the book’s narrative. Jen sees herself as a sexual being — even more so than Bob sees her — an undercurrent that’s a nod to the culture in the 1960s.
“I regard this book as a ‘pre-feminist’ novel, in that many of the issues that feminists were only beginning to be concerned with during the period of this story are addressed by Jen and Bob, though often obliquely and in ignorance of the wider currents beginning to sweep America,” Gold explains.
Much of the sex in the book is erotic, although some parts read more clinically. If, for these kids, sex is at first a way of exploring the adult world, later it becomes a way to defy it.
While sex with Jen and his growing love for her are immeasurably important to Bob, so is his desire to write and travel, “to learn how the world works.” Jen and that imagined life become rivals, nudging Bob toward an ultimatum: choose his dream or his love for Jen, who grows into a much more complex character as their journey unfolds, and certainly a more tragic one.
Jerome Gold is the author of 16 books, including Children in Prison: Six Profiles Before, During and After Incarceration; In the Spider’s Web; and Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility.
Mr. Gold received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington. He did fieldwork in Montana and American Samoa. He chose not to pursue a career in academia, but instead worked as a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children in Washington State.
