MEN AS VIRGINS - What's it about?
Are you a virgin? Have you ever been a virgin? Zola Lawrence’s Men as Virgins gives an intimate view of the physical and psychological aspects of virginity – male virginity - during the Sex, Drugs & Rock n’ Roll era of the late Sixties and the Seventies – when America’s great social experiment broke all the rules. Birth control liberated women, freed them from worries of unwanted pregnancies and shot-gun marriages. The Pill also made saying, “No” much more difficult, especially when a woman like Zola Lawrence finds God and redemption in making love.
Travel with Ms. Lawrence as she shares her virginity with a Welsh graduate student during the Tet Offense, endures an IUD before the March on Washington, deflowers her first love in London, and goes on to become the lover of other virgins as she matures from a young girl from a bad family into a young professional seeking to mate and settle down. Read her love letters to her lovers. The first chapter is to the man she shared her virginity with; the following chapters are to virgin men she loved.
Everything your parents did and haven’t told you about, it’s here. Everything they did and lie to themselves and you about, it’s here. The emotional scars of an entire generation shaped by Viet Nam, the II-S draft deferment, the Lottery, LSD and “Win the war in Vietnam and lose it at home” – it’s all here.
Not your usual baby-boomer, Lawrence is from the lower class. College casts her adrift in a middle class world where rules she never learned are morphing. She knows survival, having endured her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s insanity, and her six sisters. She knows intimacy, having taken more than a year to talk her electric-shocked mother back into reality. She loves God, having wanted to be a priest as a child. She seeks intellectual excitement, but with a 36x26x36 inch body, and a college campus where men out number women three to one, once on the Pill, she finds adventure in the arms of men.
Zola Lawrence, a pen name, was born in Chicago’s West Side and has attended and taught at colleges in Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Mt. Pleasant (Michigan), Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver (Canada), Lyon (France) and other foreign ports. She now lives in Europe.