A Switch Hitter Follows the Ads: A Sex Odyssey front cover

by Jill Baker Boyle
Published in 1969 by Ram Classics

This book is the “autobiographical” account of Jill’s travels across the U.S. as she meets men and women that she has met through adult personal ads.

As our tale begins, Jill is home in Los Angeles with her husband, Lance, and her lesbian lover, Elise, preparing to bid them adieu as she departs in her van for a year of carnal adventures.  After a goodbye evening of “triple loving,” Jill discovers her lovers have a surprise for her going away present: a painter has added “Hi-Ways and Bi-Ways” to the back of her customized van.

Jill’s first stop on her adventure is a meeting with a shy young lesbian, Joan, who lives a mere ten miles away.   Inside Hi-Ways and Bi-Ways, Jill introduces Joan to the joys of lesbianism while parked outside the Laundromat.  Before Jill departs, she plays matchmaker for Joan and her landlord.

Pressing forward on her journey, Jill travels to San Francisco to meet Mark.  After a few days of shared passion and a night of drunkenness, Jill and Mark make their way to meet with Mark’s old girlfriend, Cora.  Mark and Cora’s earlier romance ended because Mark was a high class boy and Cora was a girl born on the wrong side of the tracks.  I won’t spoil the action for you, but this tryst contains the book’s best line “Take off that cheap nightie, baby, and let me see those tits of yours.”

Jill’s heads to Denver to meet a young married couple, Kansas City to meet a frumpy librarian with an interest in dildos, on to Chicago to meet with a transvestite named Robert, and finally to Indiana to meet yet another shy young lesbian, Lois.

We learn that Lois lives on a farm with her brother, Tom, and his wife, Wilma.   Tom turns out to be an abusive drunk and Wilma is the object of Lois’ desires.  Eventually, all four of them have an encounter on the farm which culminates in the best visual scene in the book.  I can only describe it thus: garden hose enema.

When Jill tires of fun and frolic at the farm, she and Lois head to New York, the last stop in Jill’s itinerary.   Jill plans to attend a private sex party and the final scene really heats up.  But I won’t spoil it for you, you’ll have to read A Switch Hitter Follows the Ads: A Sex Odyssey to see how it all ends.

The Bisexuals front cover

by George Bishop
Published in 1964 by Century Books

As I read The Bisexuals my depraved thoughts returned obsessively to one thing: typesetting. Why typesetting? Because The Bisexuals is so riddled with typesetting errors that I sometimes wished for a “Rosetta Stone” to help decipher it.

I debated rearranging this review so that it would be as poorly presented as some passages in the book. But since I’m the only one who would get the joke and no one else would realize the errors were intentional, I decided to spare everyone the torment that I suffered through in trying to decipher this book – there are limits to my sadistic streak.

Were this book printed overseas, I could have excused the typesetter on the theory that English wasn’t his native language. Unfortunately, in what is likely the only valid claim in the whole book, the title page says that the book was printed in the USA – shooting in the foot the notion that Americans used to take pride in their work.

Claiming to be “actual sex case histories collected by … the Western Adult Institute in its nationwide study on Sexual Incompatibility,” The Bisexuals crudely attempts to trace bisexuality through time and apply a “scientific” psychoanalytic approach to bisexual “deviation.” But beware, this book is to scientific inquiry what alchemy is to chemistry.

Still, there are a few good things about this book that kept me reading. For one, the prose flows easily and provides the requisite amount of salacious detail.

The chapter devoted to the Succubus was particularly interesting. Whether the tale of Carmen d’Angelo is historically true, I don’t know (a fast internet search turned up nothing), but the image of a repressed young man taking refuge in a cave and tying a leather thong to his cock to keep his sexual urges at bay was quite an entertaining yarn either way. Also interesting is the crime spree of Marcel Bonaventure (again, searching the internet turned up nothing). This passage proved un-arousing, but interesting all the same.

My favorite passage in the book is this quote credited to E. Burns Clarke (another likely fictitious source):

“An extreme form of this perversion (bisexuality) Burns Clarke continues, “is found when the woman watches a man have sexual intercourse with another woman and then, immediately following the orgasm, rushes to orally embrace his partially erect member, thus, in effect, performing the lesbian and heterosexual functions simultaneously by vicariously making love to the woman as well…”

How this man anticipated my fantasies several years before I was born, I don’t know. That he characterizes them as “an extreme form of this perversion” only serves to warm my little twisted heart.

Other highlights (or lowlights depending on your perspective) include bestiality, finger fetishism, and others.

Even though this book suffered from its poor printing quality and is an obvious work of fiction, I still enjoyed it and you may too.