LiveWorld Transcripts

Time Warner Bookmark presents

David Allyn
Author of “Make Love, Not War”

May 18, 2000

Author David Allyn chats about his book “Make Love, Not War,” a chronicle of the sexual revolution and how sex has evolved over the last fotry years, including in-depth examinations of “swingers” and the gay and lesbian communties.

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TWBookmark: Welcome to TimeWarnerBookmark! Warner Books and The Talk City Network are proud to present our special guests for tonight, David Allyn, author of "Make Love, Not War." David has been studying the sexual revolution for several years, and his book began as his doctoral thesis for his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. David has taught history at Princeton University and his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the New York Daily News. Welcome to Talk City, David!

David Allyn: Hi, thank you for having me!

TWBookmark: Why did you write this book?

David Allyn: I've always been fascinated and intrigued by the sexual revolution. Growing up, I used to read "The Joy of Sex" from cover to cover, and my parents got divorced when I was four, so my father became a bachelor in the heyday of the singles scene. And I used to go on his dates with him, with flight attendants, and all the other women he would pick up. So I've just always been really interested in the time. Then, in college, I started reading Herbert Marcuse, who was an advocate of erotic liberation, and I got even more interested in the '60s and '70s.

Samantha: How did you start the process of writing it?

David Allyn: I did two things; I went to archives and the first archive I went to was in Boston and I looked at the papers of Robert Rimmer, who was the author of "The Harrad Experiment," a cult novel in the '60s about a sexually liberated college. And from his papers I found other people's papers, and I also started interviewing people like Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Gloria Steinem, and fortunately, Harvard had the full collection of Playboy magazines - I think almost every issue - which helped a lot.

Cc498: Of all the events covered in the book, which one did you find the most interesting to research?

David Allyn: That's hard, because I found it all extraordinarily interesting. I think that probably some of the most interesting was talking to people who had open marriages in the '60s and '70s and group marriages. I found this diary written by a woman who had an open marriage and she and her husband were also seeing sex therapists. And in her diary every day she would record her sexual activity, her extramarital encounters, her attempts to have sex with her husband that were sometimes successful and sometimes not. And I really felt like I got to know her just from reading this diary. But then I actually got to go out to Indiana to meet her and her husband. And that was one of the highlights. They invited some of their old swinging friends over, and they told me about the good old days.

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