February 10–17, 2000

books

Turn It On Again

Hippie guru Timothy Leary returns from the grave to talk about getting it on.

by Sono Motoyama

The Delicious Grace of Moving One’s Hand: The Collected Sex Writings

By Timothy Leary
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 294 p., $13.95

When Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard in 1960, after the suicide of his first wife and divorce from his second, he was, he writes in The Delicious Grace of Moving One’s Hand, "a 40-year-old single person, facing, once again, the thrills of romance and spills of the mating ground." At the same time, Leary was experiencing that middle-aged malady we now clinically refer to as erectile dysfunction. Luckily, in those pre-Viagra days, he met the Moroccan model Malaca.

"I was, at the time, a successful robot — respected at Harvard, clean-cut, witty, and, in that inert culture, unusually creative. Though I had attained the highest ambition of the young American intellectual, I was totally cut off from the body and the senses. My clothes had been obediently selected to fit the young professional image. Even after one hundred drug sessions I routinely listened to pop music, drank martinis, ate what was put before me."

Enter jazz musician Maynard Ferguson and his sexy wife, Flora Lu. Leary took psilocybin at an intimate party at their house; it was here that he met Malaca. After Malaca knocked his socks off — a mating during which he imagined they were "two sea creatures" — he realized that psychedelics were not only instruments of "philosophic revelation, mystical unity, and evolutionary insight, [but] psychedelic drugs were very powerful aphrodisiacs."

This story, recounted in the essay "Discovering the Source of All Pleasure," is contained in Delicious Grace, along with many other writings on a surprising variety of subjects. In keeping with his later fascination with technology and the digital revolution, Leary suggests in his author’s introduction, "This book is not a linear read. It’s a series of retrospective trailers. When you start reading, please browse, graze, flip from channel to chapter."

Collected by Leary before his death in 1996 and spanning some 30 years, The Delicious Grace ranges from an almost quaint account of Leary’s discovery of LSD at the age of 39 to his later, semi-intelligible writings on cybersex. Included also are a series of rants he delivered at Berkeley in 1969, as well as writings on Larry Flynt, anti-Reagan ravings and musings on the clitoris.

Often thought-provoking, sometimes loopy, and ever the optimist, Leary always wrote entertainingly and with a large dose of humor — probably reasons enough to get him kicked out of his Harvard-psych-professor gig in 1963. But before he left, he was able to turn on a fair number of celebrities, including Dizzy Gillespie, Ravi Shankar and Thelonius Monk, at his Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Project. Allen Ginsberg, "half of the Beatles," and Neal Cassady also made their contributions to his work.

Leary’s famous sound bite, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," now seems to have a double meaning. Leary wanted us to turn on to not only LSD, but also each other, in a sexual sense. But even the pleasuremeister himself didn’t connect the psychedelic with the erotic until he had that seminal (if you’ll excuse the word) experience with Malaca.

When Leary discussed his revelation with fellow psychedelic high priest Aldous Huxley, Huxley urged him not to publicize the fact; they’d already stirred up enough trouble touting the philosophical and religious aspects of the psychedelic experience. But it was too late. Hipsters across the country had already learned the secret. The revolution had begun.

As his colleague Richard Alpert told him: "All this inner exploration stuff is great. But it’s time you faced the facts, Timothy. We are turning on the most powerful sexual organ in the universe: the brain!"