Jan 20, 2006  |  By: JERRY DANIELS, JR.  | COMMENTS     

THE REWARD OF reading sex researcher Fritz Klein’s “Life, Sex, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is that he appears to dispel the long-held myth that a domineering mother and an absent or distant father create a gay or bisexual man.

Instead, the novel suggests either may produce an individual who sexually objectifies women, as in the case of married bisexual Randy Gold. Alternatively, he may become sexually impotent as does sex therapist and widower Paul Manes. A founder of the 1970s bisexual movement, Klein pairs Randy with Paul to tell a story about two men who learn to de-emphasize their erections and focus on sensuality and connecting with another.

At the same time, Klein’s story is loaded with implications on human sexuality, appearing less a novel and more a comparative case study at times, perhaps to sell his research on bisexuality.

That research, while not referenced in the book, includes Klein’s formation of a detailed sexual orientation grid, an alternative perspective to Alfred Kinsey’s research and development of the Kinsey scale (see related story on page 43).

ALTERNATING BETWEEN POINTS of view, “Life, Sex and the Pursuit of Happiness” opens with a chapter each introducing Paul and Randy.

Readers connect easily with Randy, who goes to Paul after a urologist fails to find a biological cause for his all-too-frequent erections.

Easily, readers experience excitement upon his sexual conquests or his need to masturbate in a bathroom stall.  They will understand his emotional responses to the turmoil he encounters with his mother, Rivka.

“I was shaking with fear, guilt, excitement and the unknown,” Randy tells Paul after sharing how his mother caught him spying on her in the nude.

Those buried emotions resurface later in life after his mother refuses to accept Randy’s wife — even after she converts to Judaism — and reneges on her promise to give him a position of authority in the family company she runs.

Unfortunately, Randy’s baggage from his mother has crept into his relationship with his wife, Betty. Only the conflict involves his bisexuality after Betty finds a nude drawing of his male lover. Randy’s fear that she would leave him prompts him to end the affair. 

However, that does not stop him from pursuing sexual conquests with other men secretly. He tells Paul that the men he encounters make him feel desired.

This quest for loving men might have something to do with Randy’s relationship with his father who, unlike his mother, made him feel wanted and loved. Perhaps, as the story implies, this is the reason Randy is open to homosexual affairs.

UNLIKE RANDY, PAUL’S unresolved emotional turmoil exists with his father, and that sets the stage for how his relationship with a theater director, Carl, plays out.

A heated disagreement with Carl ends their friendship — and Paul’s hopes of being a successful stage actor —  for some years.  The rift sends Paul into a depression that affects his relationship with Evi, who becomes his first wife shortly before the two leave the country.

Sadly, the change in scenery only elevates Paul’s mood a little. He and his wife soon find out that he has difficulty obtaining and sustaining an erection, which influences Paul to pursue studies and a profession in sex therapy.

Despite his knowledge of massage and training in hypnotism, the solution to Paul’s impotency, arrives only after he has been treating Randy. Their union comes only after Klein gives his readers Paul’s long-winded history, which detracts from the novel’s momentum. Klein could have spared his readers some details.

Klein’s use of the third person point of view in discussing Paul also adds little to the novel except to create an impression of Paul as anxious, reserved and contemplative.

By the novel’s end, which closes with a final chapter on Paul, readers will sigh in relief.