In first grade, we used to get out the Children’s Bible (this was a Catholic school) and giggle at the pictures of Adam and Eve. No, you couldn’t see anything, due to strategically placed flora, but to a bunch of six year olds, that was always good for a snicker. “Hah-hahaha…he’s NAKED!!!”
When I was 12-13, my grandmother would give me birthday/christmas presents of her friend Jeanette’s books. I don’t think she realized that her country-club friend and golfing buddy wrote historical romance novels! (What was really odd was that my grandmother would have her autograph them before giving them to me – you’d think Jeanette would have said something!)
Legacy was the first one, and now I’m surprised at how well-written it is. Lots of heaving bosoms and flashing eyes, but tightly-constructed plots and history that’s pretty close to the real thing.
But yeah, I definitely reread the sex parts more often than any other book on my shelf at the time. 
I see I’m the first to mention Our Bodies, Ourselves. My first stepmother had a copy which I would thumb through at solitary opportunities.
I got a copy of this when I was thirteen. My mother gave it to me. We were on a camping trip, I was a voracious reader, and the dingy little supply cabin at the entrance to the campground had some used paperbacks for a nickel apiece. So my mother grabbed a couple for my benefit. There’s no way you could convince me she knew what it was when she bought it and handed it over. She’s a good woman, but not exactly Ms. Literature.
(The other book was a history of witchcraft. I don’t remember much about it. Portnoy, though… I actually still have it. :))
IIRC, she mentions masturbating a time or two, and once she and her friend felt each other up when they were about eleven or twelve.
There was also a paragraph where she describes in length her “dirty bits”:
When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down, and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris. Then come the inner labia, which are also pressed together in a kind of crease. When they open up, you can see a fleshy little mound, no bigger than the top of my thumb. The upper part has a couple of small holes in it, which is where the urine comes out. The lower part looks as if it were just skin, and yet that’s where the vagina is. You can barely find it, because the folds of skin hide the opening. The hole’s so small I can hardly imagine how a man could get in there, much less how a baby could come out. It’s hard enough trying to get your index finger inside. That’s all there is, and yet it plays such an important role!
My mom had a copy of that book, and it was sort of educational, but my parents also had a copy of The Joy of Sex, which was much more educational in much more interesting and exciting ways.
But stuff like that with illustrations and a more straightforward presentation was never as hot as the naughty bits from racy pop literature.
Mind you, sifting Serious Literature for horny thrills always gave you the feeling that you were getting away with something; that you were putting one over The Man. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure our teacher knew exactly why there was such precocious interest in dystopian literary grimness, and just hoped something of value would also rub off {no pun intended}.
My buddy Colan had a copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but just to make sure we didn’t get too many jollies out of it, his dad made sure it was a version in the original Middle English, with annotation.
Sylvia Plath’s *The Bell Jar * - sex, sure, but with an unfortunate hymen-hemorrhaging scene.
One of my friends lent me Blume’s P.S. I Love You. That was racy!
Heh, I’d forgotten about that book. When I was a freshman in highschool, 1984 was one of the books we had to read for english class.
I suprised the teacher (and confused the other students) the day the books were being handed out to the class because I didn’t get in line to take one from the pile like everyone else. When the teacher asked why I wasn’t getting up to get a book, I pulled out my personal copy and asked if it was ok for me to read mine again, especially since it was in better condition than the dogeared books trashed by dozens of students in the years ahead of me. Startled, the teacher agreed.
When we got into the halls after class, a couple my classmates tried to make fun of me for already having the book. So I said to them… “Have you read page X yet?” and walked away while one of them glanced at the page, then read it closer, said something to the others, and they all went scrambling to read it.
Of course in the days to come, they were to lazy to read any more than the teacher assigned, so I dolled out the page numbers to look at slowly, one section per day, and … for a whole week I didn’t get beat up*. I think it was also the start of them realising that I might just not be the nerd they thought I was and a few of them started to be friends with me… partly because I promised to bring more books from home with interesting parts to read.
*having bruises on my arms from being punched was the standard for me all through elementary and middle school. High school was better.
Great story, Earthstone. I also remembered Gary Jennings’ Aztec, which as well as being a first-rate historical novel is stuffed with sadistic violence and perverted sex: teen incest sex, lesbian sex, lesbian rape, ordinary rape, small children - and nothing coy about his descriptions, either. I must have first read that one when I was about 13, and I think I had a stiff for a week afterwards.
Case Sensitive Any of Gary Jennings books are full of historic “naughty bits” The Journeyer, Spangle, Raptor…he writes about sex with anyone or thing!
Raptor! I wouldn’t really call any of Jennings’ books appropriate material for kids (I think I read Raptor at age 16) but they’re certainly fascinating and some of the best historical fiction I’ve ever come across. Jennings serves up every sort of sex imaginable – Thorn sleeps with men, women, even another hermaphrodite, in carefully described detail. Although, for my money, the best sex scene is at the very beginning of the book, when Thorn takes his/her first boyfriend’s virginity. There’s something sweetly innocent and romantic about that passage, with it’s clumsy teenaged lovers, that the later, more cynical sex scenes lack.
I like how all Jennings’ heroes, of no matter what continent or era, are at heart red-blooded Americans with a healthy interest in kinky sex and extreme violence.
Not sure if it even counts, but The Uncanny X-men, and a character named Psylocke in particular, was one of my first interests as a young boy. Yes, I had a crush on a comic book character.
Did no one else get their grubby little paws on mom’s copy of “Fear of Flying”?!!!
I must shamefully admit lusting after some of the elves in the (color graphic novels of) Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini back in the 80s.
Oh, my goodness, yes! I have thing for short, solidly built men. And Cutter and Skywise all but had my teenage twanger tingling…
Yeah, I (re) read those too…took me a long time to not feel weird about the word “pleasure”.
Oh, and The Shelters of Stone sucks.
Judith Krantz went to Wellesley, so the library always had a complete collection of her stuff. There were certain places in ‘Princess Daisy’ and ‘Scruples’ where the spine was always cracked open, if you know what I mean and yes you do.
Read Anais Nin too–it was OK, it was Literature and she was French so it was Enlightening. And for the masculine side of things, for some reason, the library had a paperback of Larry Kramer’s ‘Faggots’.
The biggest one was one my grandfather had, entitled Go Boy! It was a book about prison life in Canada in the 1950s, by one of the country’s most notorious career criminals, Roger Caron. At that time they were still using corporal punishment. prrrrr