In 1983, Berkeley poet and journalist Mark O’Brien wrote an article about sexual surrogates — women and men trained to help people with disabilities learn to use their bodies to give themselves and others erotic pleasure.
For O’Brien, the subject wasn’t academic. After a bout of childhood polio, he had spent much of his life in an iron lung. He could talk, and tap out words on a typewriter holding a stick in his mouth. He could feel things below the neck. But he couldn’t move his muscles.
In an article published in 1990, O’Brien admitted he was jealous of the people he’d interviewed in 1983 — it turns out he was, at the time, a virgin. The second piece was called, “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” and it’s the basis for the movie The Sessions.
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