Leigh, a journalist, reports stumbling across these sinful activities when he responded, supposedly innocently, to an ad offering to connect adults for “new and unusual friendships.” Upon discovering that the company running the ad was little more than a matchmaking service for kinksters of various persuasions (we’re talking pre-internet here, remember), he poses as an interested party while writing hundreds of letters to couples and singles across the country — feigning, and by necessity of building trust describing in detail, his interest in sex with men, sex with married women, sex that involved intense sadomasochism. This, he insists time and time again, was done purely in the name of research. He closes the book:

I am simply a man who found himself by accident, and unhappily at times, in a strange and alien world, or, rather, an unreal and unquiet underworld, and who reported on it — that and no more.

If ever there was a guilty conscious, Leigh had it. One can imagine him sitting up nights, writing and reading these graphic letters, “taking notes” on pornographic photos sent to him by correspondents. Disinterested and objective he surely was not. The tone of The Velvet Underground as a whole reeks of sexploitation; it pretends to tell a cautionary tale while actually allowing the reader to wallow in explicit details of that very thing it cautions against. Compared to Tea Room Trade, an ethnography on “impersonal sex in public places” also researched through first-person involvement in a subculture, it rings so false as to appear fabricated.

And yet nowhere in the writing on the book I’ve been about to scrounge up is there mention of Leigh’s approach, of the book’s veracity. As a snapshot in the history of popular sexological research surely it deserves more exploration. Who was Leigh? What were his real motives? What was left out of this text? What impact did his book have? Would he be shamed or pleased that the published house that now prints it, called simply Velvet, carries also Sade, Krafft-Ebing, and a vast array of dark erotica?

What the heck is going on? Not to jinx myself, but it’s as if Lux Alptraum, Violet Blue, and myself were the only sex writers left with jobs. If my editors are reading this, thank you for letting me keep my columns: Click Me at VillageVoice.com and The Clickable Clit at SF Weekly. Oh, and Heroine Sheik. Thanks for that, too.

I’m definitely not the first one to ponder what this will mean for the future of sex writing. Others in the business seem to feel we’re seeing the end of the sex bubble, that now the internet will be moving on. While that may be true for sex blogging, I’d hate to think that sex as a topic could really ever be old news. My hope, instead, is that with so many amazing minds freed up from their writing obligations, we’ll start to see lots of creative new projects. Looking back, we’ll think, thank goodness for the economic crisis, because without it we sex writers would never have started… Well, you can fill in the blank. The point is that, while I’m thrilled to still have my jobs, I know those mentioned above will go on to wonderful things. Would you expect anything less?

Update: read Tracy Clark-Flory’s piece on Salon about sex writing. Also read Dacia’s blog post, which rounds up the second layer of echo chamber chat on the subject.