Joe Blevins's Blog, page 43

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Sex and the Twisted Beat" (1971)

Today, Ed gives us his thoughts on rock musicians and groupies. (Illustration from Switch Hitters)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Sex and the Twisted Beat." Originally published in Switch Hitters (Calga Publishing), vol. 2, no. 2, June/July 1971.
Excerpt: "Facts being facts, most of the musical groups like the idea of all the free sex they want, not to mention all the other goodies the girls offer . . . such as narcotics along with sex. Men on the road, actors, musicians, and the like are frequently lonely men and the sight of such usually pretty girls is bound to turn them on. When sex is placed right there in front of them, there are few emotionally strong enough to refuse. However, the more in the lime-light they happen to be, the larger the supply of lovelies becomes."
Rock groupie Cynthia Plaster CasterReflections: Ed Wood had no particular understanding of rock music or youth culture in general, but his job occasionally required him to write about these subjects anyway. In 1971, for instance, he penned an article for Switch Hitters called "Sex and the Twisted Beat" about the so-called groupie scene. The author's near-total ignorance of the subject is reflected in the fact that he fails to name even one rock musician or rock song, though he claims that rock lyrics are becoming more sexually explicit. Eddie may not have been able to tell Vanilla Fudge from Iron Butterfly, but he knew that rock stars were having lots of anonymous sex with their female fans, and he figured that merited an article for other horny middle-aged men like himself. 
In truth, women have been following popular musicians since time immemorial—Eddie specifically mentions Frank Sinatra's ardent fans in the 1930s and '40s—but the term "groupie" didn't enter into the language until the mid-1960s. And by then, it was rock musicians, not jazz singers, who were attracting the most attention from love-starved young ladies. Ed seems to think that the word "groupie" refers to women who want to have sex with an entire rock group rather than just the lead singer. Whatever the origin of the word, Ed describes their methodology:

It is a tremendously competitive situation. The girls will bribe managers or advance publicity men, even the hotel workers. It is nothing to find them climbing fire escapes, for there is little that will keep them from their intended purpose. The more of their heroes they can attest to having "bedded", the more in esteem the girls are held by those of lesser accomplishments. 

It's interesting that, in his script for The Beach Bunnies (1976) , Ed has the character Elaine (Brenda Fogarty), a magazine editor, go to similar lengths to meet the movie star Rock Sanders (Marland Proctor). Now I wonder if the seed for that idea started with this article.
Anyway, as I was reading "Sex and the Twisted Beat" and its tales of sexual debauchery on the road, I started thinking about the notorious "plaster casters, " the late '60s/early '70s groupies who would make plaster molds of rock stars' penises. And then a miracle occurred: Ed Wood devoted the last third of the article to the plaster casters! I was flabbergasted. It was like Eddie was reading my mind! Even after reviewing 70+ articles from When the Topic is Sex, nothing like that had ever happened before. The timing here is bizarre, since groupie Cynthia Albritton (aka Cynthia Plaster Caster) stopped making her molds circa 1971, the very same year this article went to press.
Despite or perhaps because of Ed Wood's total lack of familiarity with rock music, "Sex and the Twisted Beat" is one of the most enjoyable articles in When the Topic is Sex. Eddie is once again in "no research" mode, although he does correctly identify Cynthia Plaster Caster as being from Chicago. Ed was really loopy when he wrote this one. My favorite passage is when he starts talking about how "the kids" are experimenting with sex:

People certainly learn quicker if they understand what they are being told. One can put a lot of jelly on the bread but the bread is still there. So what is it called if the jelly isn't there? That's how the kids apparently see the whole sphere of things in this, the modern age of sexual revolution. Sexual revolutions have been plotted and attempted many times before in history but they have seldom gained such a foothold as they have at this time. 

Do me a favor and read that passage out loud. Really put some feeling into the line, "One can put a lot of jelly on the bread but the bread is still there. So what is it called if the jelly isn't there?" That's like Ed Wood's version of a Zen koan .
Next: "The Changing Woman" (1971)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Freemont Street Flame" (1971)

Now that's a classic Ed Wood title. (Illustration from Spice 'N' Nice)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Freemont Street Flame." Also known as "Fremont Street Flame." Originally published in Spice 'N' Nice (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 2, no. 3, November/December 1971. No author credited.
Excerpt: "Give them a lot of suggestion and you're going to be in the top time for a long while to come. Put every thing on the table at once and the meal is all over. But serve it up gently and in smaller doses and you keep your audience on the edge of their seats. Anticipation can be the most enjoyable part of any affair. Sometimes even more of a pleasure than the final blow off which everybody knows is coming anyway."
Fremont Street in the 1970s.Reflections: Like "An Age of Hunchbacks," "Freemont Street Flame" is another article I was looking forward to mainly because of its title. In this case, it was because the title made it sound like one of Ed Wood's short stories. And, sure enough, the piece reads exactly like something from Blood Splatters Quickly or Angora Fever. It would have fit in beautifully in either one of those collections, although Blood Splatters Quickly already has a story about a stripper called Flame .
"Freemont Street Flame" technically qualifies as one of Eddie's nonfiction articles because it purports to be the testimony of a real-life Las Vegas stripper. But, really, this is a piece of short fiction written in the first person. File it alongside "Commentary: Article by 'T'" and "Greenwich Village Lure."  All these articles came out in 1971, which can't be a coincidence. Eddie must've been going through a phase, like Picasso's Blue Period. The similarity between "Freemont Street Flame" and "Greenwich Village Lure" is especially striking, since they're both about strippers with colorful nicknames. And the narrators both describe their writing processes. Here's what "Flame" has to say about that:

Now you've got to excuse me if I don't put the words down too well here. I'm kind of new at this writing business. But when the publishers of Spice and Nice (this delightful magazine) asked me so sweetly if I would put a little bit down about myself on paper, I jumped at the chance. I guess every girl likes to say things about herself most of the time. Everybody is always saying that girls are always talking. Well this isn't really like talking I guess because I'm silent as I sit down at the typewriter. Only the words are racing through my mind. I'm not very fast on this damn machine either. But I guess I'll hack my way through what I have to say. 

In reality, Ed Wood was famous for his lightning speed on the typewriter. It's a big part of why he was able to be so prolific, especially in the last decade of his life. I also like that he gets the title of the magazine slightly wrong. (It's Spice 'N' Nice, Eddie, not Spice and Nice.)
Honestly, these fake testimonials have been some of my favorite pieces in When the Topic is Sex, and "Freemont Street Flame" might be the best one yet. As with those other articles I mentioned, Eddie truly seems to love getting into character and writing from the perspective of a woman. I suppose it's a form of literary drag, a way of getting his male mind into a female body. And the narrator of "Freemont Street Flame" (we never learn her actual name) is the kind of woman Eddie loved: a fun-loving, uninhibited gal who speaks her mind. She even boldly slags New York City, saying it can't compete with Vegas in terms of entertainment: "They couldn't compare with the lowest club we have around here."
What makes this story extra fun—and makes "Fremont Street Flame" one of the longer pieces in When the Topic is Sex—is that, before she was a successful stripper on Las Vegas' second most famous street, our narrator danced in a "girlie show" run by her own parents (!) on the carnival circuit. So we get a whole section about carnivals, which is one of Ed Wood's favorite subjects. He wrote multiple novels about carnies, and they're among his best work as an author. He even claimed to have been a sideshow performer himself, though this may be more of Ed Wood's active imagination. He was obviously enamored of carny life, duping the rubes and staying one step ahead of the law, and wrote about it whenever he could. "Fremont Street Flame" is really a twofer: a carny story attached to a Vegas stripper story.
I personally have no emotional connection to Las Vegas, even though Elvis said you'll never be the same again after you see it. My parents took me there once on vacation, but I was a kid, and this was way before the town became a family-friendly tourist destination. At that time, there was little to nothing for a kid to do in Vegas. I just remember it being hot, blindingly bright in the daylight, and dirty. We went to a performance of the musical Ain't Misbehavin', and there were bugs crawling on our table. The gambling mecca obviously has a more important role in the Ed Wood mythos, since it's where Ed and Kathy were married. Kathy describes this in Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992):

We went to Las Vegas and got married between poker and craps and went on to Salt Lake City in a blizzard, eating canned sardines and crackers, living dangerously and crazy happily, missing cows, deer, rabbits on the road.

Ed's enthusiasm for the town is obvious in this article. Maybe Las Vegas is the purest manifestation of the dreams Ed had when he was growing up in Poughkeepsie—trashier, gaudier, and more exhilarating than even Hollywood could ever be.
P.S. When originally published in Spice 'N' Nice magazine in 1971, this article was clearly labeled "Freemont Street Flame." But in the body of the article itself, the name of the famous Las Vegas thoroughfare is correctly spelled as "Fremont." In this case, I think the booboo was the magazine's fault, not Eddie's.
Next: "Sex and the Twisted Beat" (1971)

Podcast Tuesday: "One Billboard Outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin"

Anson Williams on Happy Days.
Just as movies are often filmed out of sequence, television episodes are often broadcast in a different order than they were originally produced. Ultimately, a TV network decides when (or if) a particular episode will air; the producers of a series have little to no say over this. "A Potsie is Born, " a showcase for actor-singer Anson Williams, was the final episode of Happy Days produced during the 1979-80 television season, but it ended up being only the third-to-last (or antepenultimate) episode to air. Isn't it crazy how TV works sometimes?
At the end of that fateful season, the seventh for the nostalgic sitcom, both Ron Howard and Don Most left the show to pursue other career opportunities. Their characters, Richie and Ralph, disappeared instantly from Happy Days with very little explanation or fanfare. They were there, and then they weren't. This was quite a dilemma for Anson Williams. His character, the sweet but dense Warren "Potsie" Webber, was largely defined by his relationships to Richie and Ralph. He and Fonzie (Henry Winkler) are not really friends; they're friends-in-law. Without his buddies, who was Potsie? The show never really found a satisfying answer to this question in its remaining four seasons.
In a way, then, "A Potsie is Born" marks the end of an era for Anson Williams as much as it does for Ron Howard and Don Most. This is the last big Potsie story during the Richie/Ralph era of Happy Days. Does it make for a good episode? Find out when you listen to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "The Girls of the Golden State" (1971)

Ed Wood salutes the ladies of his adopted state. (Illustration from Nude But Nice)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "The Girls of the Golden State." Originally published in Nude But Nice (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 1, no. 2, May/June 1971.
Excerpt: "Clothing certainly does make the woman. There is nothing worse than watching some girls wearing absolute garbage and think it's cute. This rarely happens with the girls from a downtown business building. It is supposed that their bosses see to that . . . at least during the working days of the week. Who can say what they will look like on those off hours and weekends?"
Reflections: No one has ever written quite like Ed Wood. Eddie just had a way of stringing words and phrases together that was exclusively his own. Take his 1971 article "The Girls of the Golden State" as an example. The premise of this piece is simply that California sure has a lot of pretty girls, most of whom came to the state for the motion picture and television industries but wound up as secretaries, topless waitresses, nude models, and porn stars instead. Conceptually, this is nothing special or profound. Eddie has advanced similar ideas in other articles from When the Topic is Sex.
What makes this particular article worthwhile is Eddie's peculiar grasp of the English language. There's something almost alien about his writing style. I keep flashing back to a quote from actress Valda Hansen in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992). 
Valda Hansen on Ed Wood: "He doesn't belong here."
That quote must've struck Rudolph Grey as significant, too, because he ends the entire oral history section of the book with it. It seems that even Kathy Wood herself thought of her husband as a quasi-alien. 
Take this random sentence from "The Girls of the Golden State": "Then, too, the hostesses and other personnel needed to keep a megalopolis running on a prettier keel are crying out for the more pleasant appearing of the applicants." It's difficult to imagine a native speaker of English phrasing a sentence that way. I mean, "keep a megalopolis running on a prettier keel"? Who talks like that? Ed Wood, that's who. I'm also reminded of what Roger Ebert said of Ed Wood's idol, Bela Lugosi, in a review of Dracula (1931) :

Lugosi had been living and working in the United States for a decade by the time the film was made, and yet there is something about his line readings that suggests a man who comes sideways to English--perhaps because in his lonely Transylvanian castle, Dracula has had centuries to study it but few opportunities to practice it.

Obviously, Eddie grew up with the language and had plenty of opportunities to practice it, but he still writes like someone who "comes sideways to English." In Ted Newsom's documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994), narrator Gary Owens explains it this way:

Calling an Ed Wood script illogical is like saying dreams make no sense. Images and words went straight from his mind to the page. His stream-of-consciousness dialogue was like a ransom note pasted together from words randomly cut out a Korean electronics manual.

Note that comparison of Ed's writing to Korean. It strikes me now that we commonly use the same word, "alien," to refer to those from different countries and from different planets. Maybe that's why Ed and Bela had such a connection: they both felt like outsiders.
Occasionally in When the Topic is Sex, I've come across articles in which Ed Wood keeps his weirdness in check and writes in a straightforward, almost anonymous style. "The Girls of the Golden State" is not one of those articles. Here's how Eddie describes the plight of women who become adult film actresses:

This might seem the answer to the aspiring young lady who hasn't previously given up on ever getting before the cameras. However, it is only the whipped cream layered over another solid brick. The career in these films is short-lived for any girl, since the producers want new faces for each production . . . new faces and new exquisite bodies. The girls must continually look for new production companies, and eventually they run out and the girl is back behind the desk or coffee urn. 

"The whipped cream layered over another solid brick." Phrases like that are why I read Ed Wood articles.
Next: "Freemont Street Flame" (1971)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "The Pimp" (1972)

If hooking is the world's oldest profession, is pimping the second oldest? (Illustration from Fetish Annual)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "The Pimp." Originally published in Fetish Annual (Gallery Press/Pendulum), 1972. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "We find that many of these relationships begin when the whore is jailed. There she meets other girls . . . and generally some form of sexual relationship comes about. And when they get out of prison the relationship continues in the pimp/whore—husband/wife lesbian relationship. But it is also a fact that it is seldom a lesbian pimp will have more than one girl working for her."
One of the many books Ed Wood used.Reflections: As we have seen throughout When the Topic is Sex, Ed Wood sometimes did his homework when he wrote nonfiction articles and sometimes didn't. When he wrote "The Pimp" for 1972's Fetish Annual, Eddie definitely did his homework. He might have even been stone cold sober when he wrote it. Virtually the entire article consists of quotes from books on the subject of prostitution. Among these are: Call House Madam: The Story of the Career of Madam Beverly Davis (1944) by Serge G. WolseyThe Orderly Disorderly House (1960) by Carol Erwin with Floyd Miller Prostitution and Morality (1964) by Harry Benjamin, M.D. and R.E.L. Masters The Second Oldest Profession ( 1931) by Dr. Ben Reitman A House is Not a Home (1953) by Polly AdlerAn unnamed book by sociologist Sara Harris ; Harris wrote numerous books about sex and prostitution, including Cast the First Stone (1957) and The Puritan Jungle: America's Sexual Underground (1969)."The Pimp" might be the most research-heavy article in this entire collection, citing works by doctors and by those who have worked in the prostitution profession. Some of these authors are colorful characters in their own right, including anarchist doctor  Ben Reitman and real-life madam  Polly Adler . Polly even got her own posthumous biopic in 1964 with Shelley Winters in the lead!
While this is good news for the reader who earnestly wants to know about pimping, it's bad news for Ed Wood fans, since this type of article leaves very little room for Eddie to be Eddie. When the Topic is Sex is most fun when Ed is blatantly making things up or is supplementing the facts with his own curious brand of philosophizing. There's very little of that here. In "The Pimp," he sticks to the facts... or at least what he thinks are the facts.
And what are those facts? According to Ed Wood, the pimp has largely been obscure up to this point in history, operating in the shadows of American society. "Much is written about the prostitute and the madams, and the whorehouses and, the call girls, etc.," Ed complains, "but little is expounded upon the pimp." This is tough to imagine today, since the gaudily-dressed pimp—generally seen driving a Cadillac and carrying a jewel-encrusted walking stick— has become a vaunted figure in popular culture through songs, movies, TV shows, video games, and even Halloween costumes. My own thoughts about the profession are inextricably tied to  Pimpbot 5000  from Late Night with Conan O'Brien in the '90s and Eddie Murphy's Velvet Jones from Saturday Night Live in the '80s.
When Ed wrote this article, real-life pimp Iceberg Slim (1918-1992) had been writing about his life for a few years already, but the blaxploitation film Willie Dynamite (1973), which centers around a pimp, had not been released. Neither had Taxi Driver (1974), in which Harvey Keitel plays a white pimp named Sport. In that film, Sport memorably sweet talks Iris (Jodie Foster), a teenage prostitute in his employ. "The Pimp" includes a similar monologue, clipped from The Second Oldest Profession. It reads, in part:

Now I'll admit I got another woman. But you know me, she don't mean a damned thing to me; she is just helping me pay my debts; you are my heart. I love you. None of these broads can give me anything, only you. I am just crazy about you. My one ambition is to see you get out of the racket. I am just fussing around with Pearl, so as to get a little more money to pay our debts. The more money Pearl earns the sooner you will stop hustling. I wouldn't live with that woman if she was the last woman on earth. Look at your lovely hair. Hers is like a horse's tail. You have a beautiful body. I bet if the artists in town knew about you, you would be the most popular model in town.

The entire monologue is much longer, but you get the idea. I can easily imagine Harvey Keitel's character saying very similar things to his women. Actress Jodie Foster has said that Keitel imitated R&B singer Barry White for this scene.
The madams quoted in this article are divided on the merits of pimps. Beverly Davis "detests pimps and won't allow them on her premises," but Carol Erwin says that she only hires girls with pimps because the free agents are too wild and hard to control. They're lazy and they drink, and some of them even "romance" the customers, which is strictly a no-no. Better to hire a girl who's under the thumb of a pimp.
Ed Wood, for his part, seems to look approvingly upon these men. Sure, he allows, there are those who beat the girls violently, but these bad eggs are "far from being a majority." In fact, the average pimp is "a mighty good guy to have around in case of trouble." Ed even gives pimps credit for "adding to the decline of venereal infections in the United States." In a sense, then, "The Pimp" can be seen as Ed Wood's tribute to an important yet widely misunderstood profession. We salute you, Mr. Pimp! Keep up the good work. You're doing your part to keep America clean!
Next: "The Girls of the Golden State" (1971)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Prostitutes as Wives" (1971)

Can you turn a ho into a housewife? Ed Wood has some thoughts.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Prostitutes as Wives." Originally published in Orgy (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 3, no. 4, November/December 1971. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "The full time prostitute has become bored with the whole sex scene. It has meant nothing to her. And when she finally gives it up as a lost cause she is giving it up happily. Nothing is going to make her more happy then to know she has the same man coming home to her every night and it will be the same man she will wake up to the next morning."
Andy Kaufman marries a hooker on Taxi.Reflections: When I was reading Ed Wood's 1971 article "Prostitutes as Wives," I could not help but remember what actor Peter Fonda, star of Easy Rider (1969), told Rolling Stone writer Elizabeth Campbell about the title of his most famous film :

"Easy rider" is a Southern term for a whore's old man, not a pimp, but the dude who lives with a chick. Because he's got the easy ride. Well, that's what's happened to America, man. Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking the easy ride."

"Prostitutes as Wives," I suppose, is Ed Wood's take on these "easy riders," the ones who decide to make the arrangement permanent, but he seems to view them more favorably than Peter Fonda did. In fact, this article weighs the pros and cons of marrying prostitutes and concludes that the former outweigh the latter. Yes, Ed says, men should marry prostitutes!
Ed begins this piece by describing the same sexual double standard that was at the heart of yesterday's article, "A Look at the Nymphomaniac." Namely, young men are expected to be sexually experienced by the time they marry, but young women are not. A girl is supposed to be virginal and pure until her wedding night. But this brings with it its own set of problems, as Ed explains:

But here comes the rub! Even though she must be a virgin, he expects all the pleasures of a professional. If she doesn't know what it's all about he feels cheated. She is just a 'dumb broad' who doesn't know her ass from a hole in the ground. How can women be so dumb? He might just as well do what he has done for years . . . masturbate. It would be just about as exciting. 

This is an unworkable and unfair system that is quite cruel to the ladies. Incidentally, Ed provides us with a list of derogatory terms directed as sexually-active young women—not just the usual ones like "tramp" and "bitch" but obscure ones like "turkey," "gobbler," and "clap trap." That last one is kind of clever, I must admit. Mean but clever.
So if marrying virgins is impractical, how about marrying hookers instead? Ed informs us that, after years of taking on male clients, many prostitutes are looking to get out of the business and settle down with a nice guy. They're experts when it comes to pleasing a man, after all, and they're very unlikely to cheat on their husbands and ruin a good thing. You don't have to worry about them getting pregnant unexpectedly either, because ex-prostitutes are very careful about birth control. You might worry about venereal diseases, since they've had so many partners, but Eddie says it's not a problem. He writes:

As any doctor, who has examined these prostitutes will tell . . . they are among the cleanest agents around. This is because the professional prostitute has learned early that her body is the only thing she has to sell . . . to use for making a living. And she is not going to sell a diseased or crippled body. She learns all the protections there are and she practices those protections thoroughly. And she generally has her own personal physician who takes care of her regularly. Few ever become unknowing, unwilling carriers. 

So everything's coming up roses for the man who sees a streetwalker and decides to put a ring on it. According to Ed, this type of gent "has everything, sexually, going for him." This is actually one of the more focused and coherent articles in When the Topic is Sex. Ed might've even been sober or semi-sober when he wrote it. 
What's great about Ed Wood as a writer is that he will approach a topic from an angle that I had not anticipated. I assumed, for example, that this article would be about men who marry experienced prostitutes, i.e. women who have been employed in "the world's oldest profession" for years and are looking to retire. And that is what "Prostitutes as Wives" is mostly about. But Ed also writes about housewives who become prostitutes either out of boredom or to supplement their husbands' meager income. This is an entirely different situation.
Ed Wood does not seem to approve of these "amateur" housewife prostitutes. Unlike the professionals, these silly women don't know how to protect themselves against diseases or unplanned pregnancy. Men are liable to end up with a child who looks suspiciously like the blond-haired milkman. No, says Ed, what you want is a woman who used to be a hooker, not one who aspires to be a hooker. Just one of the many valuable life lessons to be found within When the Topic is Sex.
Next: "The Pimp" (1972)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "A Look at the Nymphomaniac" (1972)

Let's look at a typical nymphomaniac... through a keyhole, preferably.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "A Look at the Nymphomaniac." Originally published in Fantastic (Gallery Press), vol. 1, no. 1, August/September 1972.
Excerpt: "It is reflected that by today's standards, Madam V. wouldn't be singled out at all because of her particular sex drives. She might be classified as more normal than many other classifications designed for sexual use and abuse. Times and values have indeed changed and are continually changing. Sexual permissiveness has apparently turned around to what makes one happy and keeps one from striking out for the Rubber Room At The Happy Farm."
The library of Ed Wood's youth.Reflections: Before I get into the merits of Ed Wood's 1972 article "A Look at the Nymphomaniac," I want to discuss a topic that comes up frequently in this article and others included in When the Topic is Sex. You might call it one of the principal motifs of this collection.
Specifically, Ed Wood feels that libraries used to keep their sexually-explicit books hidden away in some dank dungeon beneath the building. In "A Look at the Nymphomaniac," for instance, Ed refers to "the no-no books which couldn't be checked out by the simple man on the street." Ed says this policy existed because the doctors of the past wanted to keep the general public ignorant about sex. Why they'd want to do that, he doesn't say.
Is any of this true? Since Ed Wood grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, I decided to ask Shannon Butler, the current historian for the Poughkeepsie Public Library District, about how libraries worked in Ed's day. Here's what she had to say:

Adriance Memorial Library was the only library in Poughkeepsie at the time [Ed Wood lived here] with the exception of the Vassar College library, so [Ed] certainly would have come here. As far as a forbidden storehouse of books, I doubt that ever existed. In the old days of the library, the collections were all over the place, including the basement, and in those days it was a "retrieval only" system, meaning the librarian would go and get what you wanted. Perhaps by the mid-century, they might have had a separate area for the storage of more "mature" subjects but we don't have any record of old floor plans to determine if such a location existed.

So not exactly a definitive answer. Maybe this was the way it merely seemed to Ed when he was a child, i.e. the adults were keeping "the good stuff" to themselves. Reader Guy Deverell pointed me to this article , implying there was some truth behind Ed's suspicions.
Anyway, by the time Ed wrote "A Look at the Nymphomaniac," he was a grown man and had access to as much adult-oriented material as he wanted. Books, magazines, tabloids, films, you name it. Eddie devoured as much of this material as he could and then regurgitated it in his own work, adding his own fetishes and quirks along the way. In a perfect world, "Nymphomaniac" would be a neat companion piece to Ed's  "Satyriasis and Prostitution" from the previous year. In truth, however, this is just a random junkpile of sketchy information and dubious ideas loosely themed around nymphomania.
In a a way, "A Look at the Nymphomaniac" is a first cousin to Ed's glossary articles like "There Are Different Words" (1974) and "Sexual Terminology" (1971) . He devotes two sections of "Nymphomaniac" to defining sex-related terms, not just "nymphomania" and "nymphomaniac" but also "hyperesthesia," "priapism," "hyperhedonia," and "voluptuary," among others. My guess is that Ed must've owned some dogeared dictionary of sex terms and wanted to get as much use out of it as he possibly could. Here, it feels like Ed is blatantly trying to pad out the article with text. Maybe he was paid by the word or by the column inch. 
If this article has a thesis, it's that the term "nymphomania" has historically been used to stigmatize women who simply had a healthy appetite for sex, equal to that of a man. Despite the findings of Freud and Kinsey, we still don't seem to think that women should be as interested in sex as men, so we label them as sick or abnormal. Ed describes the grossly unfair double standard:

Herewith, we then are to believe that the woman who felt she required more than the usual amount of sex was one of those horrid persons to which the nymphomaniac title was given. She could be pointed out in the street . . . be scoffed at . . . have her name bandied around in the saloons or the pool hall . . . and she might be searched out by the same type of male. However, in the case of the male who found himself in the same position as that over-sexed woman it was a different story. He was looked upon as the most virile of males. He had a healthy outlook upon the sex life. In all respects he was normal. 

After reading that, you might be tempted to label "A Look at the Nymphomaniac" one of Ed Wood's more progressive articles. But, Ed being Ed, he can't stay on topic for long. He includes some nonsense—attributed to a psychologist whose existence I cannot confirm—about how all lesbians subconsciously long to be loved by men. He also says that nymphomaniacs might be responsible for "the massive attacks of VD which are striking the nation." So, yeah, not the most feminist-friendly material ever. Still, though, Ed is willing to acknowledge that women enjoy sex. That's something, right?
Next: "Prostitutes as Wives" (1971)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Head—Heaven and Hell" (1973)

Today, Ed Wood wants to discuss oral sex with you.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media 2021).

The article: "Head—Heaven and Hell." Publication data unknown. Listed on Ed Wood's resume as having been written in 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "Oh, the pleasures of it all . . . the dynamic thrills that builds in the scrotum and travels along the shaft to that final explosion and a willing partner gobbling it all down. It is the pleasure of all pleasures, and it isn't only the young who practice such affairs . . . prostitutes have been professionals at both fellatio and cunnilingus for centuries. Many specialize in the art."
"When I said I wanted a little head..."Reflections: There's a little game I play whenever I'm reviewing an article from When the Topic is Sex. It's called Let's Guess How Drunk Ed Wood Was When He Wrote This Thing. Answers can range from "not drunk at all" to "completely bombed out of his mind." In the case of 1973's "Head—Heaven and Hell," my guess is "pretty goddamned drunk." Why? Because this article captures Eddie at his Eddie-est, flitting from topic to topic in a rambling, florid, stream-of-consciousness style rife with his trademark ellipses. It reads like the transcript of someone else's dream. There are days when Ed does not write as much as babble onto the page. This is such a day.
At the basic molecular level, "Head—Heaven and Hell" is Ed Wood's essay about the pleasures of oral sex. He says he'll discuss both fellatio and cunnilingus, but the former gets more attention since Eddie's audience was overwhelmingly male.  Wood seems at first to want to detail the history of this practice, mentioning the popularity of oral sex in Ancient Rome. But then he goes off on a weird tangent about how paintings from that era tend to depict "the elite of society" rather than "the rabble," probably because the latter had no money with which to pay the artists. He then adds:

But is it this way today? Not by the tail feathers of a cockatoo. The entire situation is in reverse. The elite have gone into hiding and the masses have come to the foreground . . . to have their pictures taken, painted and whatever . . . and fellatio and cunnilingus stands well out in the foreground.

See what Ed just did there? He remembered that this article was supposed to be about oral sex, so he somehow managed to steer himself back onto the main road. I'm not complaining, mind you. I like when Eddie takes the scenic route, especially if it means we'll get phrases like "not by the tail feathers of a cockatoo." This is not a common English idiom, by the way, but Ed uses it as if it were.
At several points throughout When the Topic is Sex, Ed Wood has discussed whether or not oral sex is normal and healthy. It seems that, half a century ago, this common practice was more controversial and less accepted than it is today. "Head—Heaven and Hell" repeats most of Ed's main talking points on the subject. As usual, Eddie assures us that "the psychiatrists and men of science" have given it their approval, no matter what the moralists might say. And, yet again, the author takes this opportunity to disparage the old-fashioned missionary position, comparing it unfavorably to oral intercourse. 
With all these side trips, it takes a while for Ed to arrive at his thesis statement: "Fellatio and cunnilingus can actually send a person to Heaven or Hell, as the case may be." As what case may be, Ed? What the hell are you talking about? 
The paragraphs that immediately follow offer little in the way of explanation or illumination. Ed says that oral sex is convenient for those couples who want to get romantic at movie theaters or parks without getting caught. He also says that fellatio is commonly offered to customers at "health spas and massage parlors," leading to some recent police raids. Then, he switches gears dramatically and starts describing "fleabag whores" giving blowjobs in dank alleyways. Okay, at least now we're back on familiar ground. Many of Ed's short stories in Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever deal with hookers, alleys, or both.
But we still haven't gotten to why oral sex can be heaven or hell. Ed finally addresses this burning issue near the end of the article. You see, fellatio and cunnilingus can cause people to experience tremendous pleasure. That's the "heaven" part. But there's a downside. Remember those "fleabag whores" we talked about? Many of their clients, according to this article, have "dropped dead on the spot." And if you think that's an undignified way to go, Ed offers a final anecdote about a "young fellow" and his girlfriend who decided to have a little oral fun during a car trip. To say the least, they ended up regretting it.
Next: "A Look at the Nymphomaniac" (1972)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "College Cherries" (1974)

College life is the pits, according to Ed Wood.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "College Cherries." Originally published in Fantastic Annual (Gallery Press), 1974. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "The day of the goldfish eating, the crowding of as many bodies as possible into telephone booths, even the panty raids seem to have disappeared into history to be replaced by pot-sex orgy parties. Taking any kind of survey would prove that few students have escaped the vapors of pot . . . and it was reported recently that the grass smoke was so thick in one dormitory that even nonsmoking visitors were enveloped and sent to their own rewards simply by being there . . . or guilt by association." Another of Ed Wood's explorations of college life.
Reflections: Ed Wood was part of the so-called Greatest Generation, i.e. those Americans born between 1901 and 1927 who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II. I'm guessing many of Eddie's readers in the 1970s were also members of this fabled generation. But the Greatest Generation was middle-aged or older by this time, long past the days of having wild, uninhibited sex with multiple partners. As a result, most of the articles in When the Topic is Sex tend to focus on the erotic escapades of the younger generation. In a more general sense, then, you could say that this book is Ed Wood's critique of the Baby Boomers—their manners and morals.
"College Cherries" purports to be an exposé of what was happening on America's college campuses in the early 1970s. Namely, the students were screwing each other's brains out in every possible combination. Now, what Ed Wood didn't know about college life you could almost squeeze into the Hollywood Bowl, but he paints a pretty vivid picture in "College Cherries" anyway. He's essentially a sci-fi writer imagining what life must be like on a distant planet.
Above all, Ed wants us to know that the days of virginal college girls are over. "A cherry in the student body is something that's few and far between," he writes. So, then, why is this article called "College Cherries'? I'll chalk it up to administrative oversight. Or maybe Ed just didn't think these things through. Anyway, according to this article, the modern college girl wants to have as many sexual partners as possible. Ed also takes this opportunity to disparage the missionary position once again. (He writes about this so often that it seems like a personal vendetta.) 
Before college girls started to "put out," Ed Wood informs us, college boys had to resort to whorehouses or homosexuality. "After all when a male reaches college age his sex stimulation has become very important to him," Ed writes. I have no idea if this is true. Did straight college boys used to hump each other in their dorm rooms? This article implies that they did.
At least for the purposes of this story, Ed sides with the youngsters and their attempts to undermine or sidestep the "ancient rules" imposed upon them by the prudish, old-fashioned college administrators. These include curfews and the segregation of men and women in the dorms. Eddie even seems to approve of the students having marijuana-fueled orgies and switching partners every few weeks. At the article's conclusion, he writes:

 If anything is being done to stop the forward sex motion of these young people, either by parents or the faculties, it is being done in entire secrecy . . . secrecy from the students and themselves as well. So far little harm is being felt by these sexual friendships, and in none too few cases it is said that the sexual freedom movement has done a hell of a lot more good than bad . . . it might be a mind stopper to some, but it is a tremendous mind builder to others.

A pretty forgiving attitude, wouldn't you say?
Compare this to Ed Wood's script for The Class Reunion (1972) , in which the twentysomething characters express nothing but contempt for college kids and their immoral ways. Then again, those same twentysomethings wind up having an orgy in their hotel room, so who are they to judge? Maybe Ed mellowed a bit between The Class Reunion and "College Cherries." Or he was in a grouchy mood when he wrote the former.
Incidentally, "College Cherries" is another article that I had already reviewed. If you want to know what I thought of this story back in 2019, I invite you to read a blog post entitled "Ed Wood Goes to College."
Next: "Head—Heaven and Hell" (1973)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" (1973)

Can you guess what A.C.A.R. stands for?

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "The A.C.A.R. Revisited." Originally published in An Illustrated Study of Erotic Love (Calga Publishing), vol. 4. no. 1, January/February 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "Rubber or not rubber (to quip) the skin of the animal is still used. These devices, much more expensive, are produced from a finely processed animal intestine. Of course the claim from those men who use this type, is that even the thinnest rubber can't compare. They claim the feeling is all there . . . and too there is a certain amount of status involved . . . costing much more, that perhaps makes them feel they are in a higher lovemaking position."

"That's the way it was and we LIKED it!"Reflections: If you're in the mood to read a brief history of condoms, you're in luck. The Ed Wood article I'm reviewing today is "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" from 1973, and it'll tell you more about the development of the humble but useful prophylactic than you probably ever wanted to know. I'm not sure why Eddie or his editors thought that the readers of An Illustrated Study of Erotic Love would care about any of this, but there it is nevertheless. This is already his second article about rubbers, so there must have been some demand for this material.
The titular abbreviation stands for "always carry a rubber," and Eddie starts the article with some rambling nonsense about what he calls the A.C.A.R. Club:

The story of the A.C.A.R. Club has been told before, but that was a long time ago. Perhaps you've read it . . . if you were in that particular generation gap. But if you haven't read about the A.C.A.R. Club then you don't know what the A.C.A.R. Club is all about. Actually it's a very clinical club; a very practical club; one to which the boy scouts motto, Be Prepared, is also their motto.

That excerpt suggests to me that Ed Wood had a shaky grasp on what the term "generation gap" actually means or how to use it in a sentence. He is correct, however, that  Be Prepared   is the motto of the Boy Scouts of America. Tom Lehrer had a whole song about it.
Ed Wood begins his history of the condom in the 1500s with the early, not-quite-successful efforts of Gabriel Fallopius and Hercule Saxonia. Legend has it that it was an associate of England's King Charles II, a "Dr. Condom," who gave the device its name in the 1600s. Eddie repeats this story in "The A.C.A.R. Revisited," although there is no evidence to suggest that "Dr. Condom" was a real person. But that's easy for me to say. I have Google and Wikipedia; Ed Wood didn't. He was doing his best for 1973.
Regardless of who invented or named them, the earliest condoms were made of sewn-up linen. But these leaked too much to be effective and were replaced by sheaths made from sheep guts. Better but still not perfect. Prophylactics weren't actually made of rubber until the 1800s, when Charles Goodyear (yes, the namesake of the tire company) and Thomas Hancock developed the process of vulcanization. Modern condoms are made of latex, though Ed informs us that some connoisseurs still use animal-based condoms. This, too, is accurate , even today.
Just as "Youthful Boobs" was Ed Wood's all-purpose thesis statement about brassieres, "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" is a repository of random information about condoms. Ed quotes French aristocrat Madam Sevigne (1626-1696), who expressed her dissatisfaction with the early condoms: "The device is armor against love, complained the good lady, and gossamer against infection." Isn't that a lovely way of putting it? Ed also tells us that condoms are (briefly) mentioned in James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and even gives us an early example of an advertising slogan (or "ad-poem") for prophylactics. Towards the end of the article, Ed discusses French ticklers and lubricated condoms.
So "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" starts out as a history of condoms and then degenerates into a grab-bag of (possibly dubious) information about them. Is there any point to it? Yeah, a little. Ed Wood wants modern readers to appreciate "that convenient aluminum foil packet with the life-saving (or life preventing) little balloon." All through this article, as I read about the early attempts at prophylactics, I was thinking of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man character and his reactionary views on condoms:

In my day, we didn‘t have these thin latex condoms so you could enjoy sexual pleasure. In my day, there was only one kind of condom. You took a rabbit skin and wrapped it around your privates and tied it off with a bungee cord. And you couldn‘t feel nothing. Half the time, you didn‘t even know if your partner was there. And we used the same one over and over again because we were morons, just a bunch of hairless head kabobs standing around with rabbit skins on our dinks and that‘s the way it was and we liked it.

Comparatively speaking, Ed Wood is at least more progressive than that.
Next: "College Cherries" (1974)