Alex Comfort: Stop Calling Me Dr Sex

Few authors are remembered on their own terms; some grow to hate the books for which they are most admired. There can be few whose life and work has suffered such a total eclipse as that experienced by Comfort. If he is recalled today, it is in association with that perennial 99p introductory offer on the back of the Sunday supplement, and that line-drawing of the couple with the straggly Woodstock hair. The true nature of The Joy of Sex, though, was one that few noticed at the time and few have remarked on since. It was a book about personal responsibility and freedom from convention; a book founded on the idea that political and erotic repression shared a common pathology. The Joy of Sex was the anarchist manifesto that conquered 1970s suburbia – a radical text that found a place on the shelves of millions of readers who didn't know Kropotkin from Kermit the Frog...

Matthew Sweet on Alex Comfort in The Guardian Review.

Sweet's documentary about Comfort, Stop Calling Me Dr Sex, is on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow at 7.45pm.
Some of the late anarchist dude's books that weren't The Joy Of Sex - which is what the programme is kinda about - are available to read online here.