My other source of inspiration for this blog is the sex-columnist and writer Dan Savage. In the Nineties, I spent a year in New York City living with my Sikh boyfriend in the Upper West Side. He was very busy working in investment banking and I was just frigging around between NYU, shady bars and bohemian hangouts in the Village. Back then there was no Craigslist nor the web mighty power, so people still relied upon paper publications and radical magazines to read something edgy and spicy. Case in point, each Wednesday I used to pick up a free copy of the legendary Village Voice, the NY counterculture magazine, founded, among the others, by the writer and intellectual Norman Mailer (whose widow and son I had the pleasure to meet during one of my New York wanderings). On the Village Voice, a guy named Dan Savage kept a sex column called Savage Love. And it was indeed savage! A multitude of confused adults, teenagers, women, men, gays, trans wrote to him with the most widely varying and embarrassing sexual issues. The way in which Dan answered them and dealt with any given sexual dilemma felt very refreshing to me. Serious yet funny, light-hearted and witty, he had a soothing answer for everyone. His constant play on acronyms and word puns, actually helped me learning a great deal of slang. I remember laughing out loud reading his column on the subway and there I understood how talking and writing about sex is necessary for a healthy and happy sexual life. Today Dan is a celebrated writer, has his own website and has become a celebrity. PS The back pages of the Village Voice featured the Personal Ads and were divided into: Woman Seeking Woman, Man Seeking Man, Woman Seeking Man, Man Seeking Woman, Couple Seeking Man … And then came my favorite one of them all: the section ANYTHING GOES. Each week I eagerly grabbed my free copy and jumped right on the Ads page to read those exhilarating, saucy, sexy and fucked-up requests. From ‘looking to sniff used underwear’ to ‘I need a fake girlfriend to come with me to Venezuela, all expenses paid, to make my ex jealous’. The world is beautiful because it is so diverse. And human sexuality is the most varied, different and unhinged form of self-expression. Fucking enjoy it!