During the American sixties, the resurgent interest in Wilhelm Reich and the widespread impact of Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation encouraged the idea of coupling psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich's works reminded radicals once again of the integral connection between political revolution and sexual freedom, while Marcuse's critique, a bold attempt of the mid-fifties to read Freud as a revolutionary utopian, suggested the desirability of a marriage between Marx and Freud, a marriage that would have seemed unnatural to many of the Old Left generation. Certainly, too, the writings of Norman O. Brown and Paul Goodman gave credence to the idea that sex, psychology, and radical politics were necessarily interrelated.

The first play I attended at my all-boys secondary school was Marlowe's Dr Faustus. The lower boys crammed in the gallery were not wholly engaged by grandiloquent Elizabethan cadences, nor by the laboriously unfolding plot. What stopped the whispering and fidgeting and then brought the house down was the scene in which Faustus, as reward for selling his soul, is allowed to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. In this production the hell-bent Doctor had to make do with the prettiest boy in the school. Wild whoops, mating calls, indecent suggestions for further action rained down from the gallery. At the curtain call Helen again stole the show. Next morning, the Headmaster, a Scottish Presbyterian whose zeal for the Lord was second only to his zeal for rugby football, rebuked the school for the shameful scenes and prescribed a three-mile run to cool our ardour.

The development and evolution since 1965 of a legally recognized right of privacy through decisions reached by the Supreme Court in the United States may be seen as evidence of one of two things. It represents either the Supreme Court's further usurpation of the authority of legislatures by its expansion of rights — areas never intended by the framers of the Constitution — or it demonstrates the creativity and sensitivity of Justices of the Court in finally making explicit what has been implicit in the broad language of the Constitution, namely, that a right of privacy has always belonged to the citizen. Whichever position one holds, there may be little doubt that the Court's excursion into this previously uncharted territory, with its subsequent “stops” along the journey at questions of contraception, abortion and, of concern in this essay, “unnatural” sexual acts, has given rise to considerable controversy and, in some instances, confusion.