Memories of ‘hands on’ sex therapy

There’s an amusing passage in Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree where he recounts his own experience of a curious attempt at surrogate partner therapy – a type of sex therapy where a ‘stand in’ partner engages with sexual activity with the client to help overcome sexual difficulties.

In Solomon’s case, he was a young gay man still confused about his sexuality who signed himself up to a cut-price clinic to try and awaken any possibility of ‘hidden heterosexual urges’.

It’s a curious historical snapshot, presumably from the early 1980s, but also quite funny as Solomon dryly recounts the futile experience.

When I was nineteen, I read an ad in the back of New York magazine that offered surrogate therapy for people who had issues with sex. I still believed the problem of whom I wanted was subsidiary to the problem of whom I didn’t want. I knew the back of a magazine was not a good place to find treatment, but my condition was too embarrassing to reveal to anyone who knew me.

Taking my savings to a walk-up office in Hell’s Kitchen, I subjected myself to long conversations about my sexual anxieties, unable to admit to myself or the so-called therapist that I was actually just not interested in women. I didn’t mention the busy sexual life I had by this time with men. I began “counselling” with people I was encouraged to call “doctors,” who would prescribe “exercises” with my “surrogates” – women who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else.

In one protocol, I had to crawl around naked on all fours pretending to be a dog while the surrogate pretended to be a cat; the metaphor of enacting intimacy between mutually averse species is more loaded than I noticed at the time. I became curiously fond of these women, one of whom, an attractive blonde from the Deep South, eventually told me she was a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got into trouble down the morgue.

You were supposed to keep switching girls so your ease was not limited to one sexual partner; I remember the first time a Puerto Rican woman climbed on top of me and began to bounce up and down, crying ecstatically, “You’re in me! You’re in me!” and how I lay there wondering with anxious boredom whether I had finally achieved the prize and become a qualified heterosexual.

Surrogate partner therapy is still used for a variety of sexual difficulties, although only fringe clinics now use it for pointless ‘gay conversion therapy’.

Although it is clearly in line with good psychological principles of experiential therapy, it has been quite controversial because of fears about being, as Solomon says, “not exactly prostitutes” along with some well-founded ethical concerns.

In the UK, the first bona fide clinic that used surrogate partner therapy was started in the 1970s and run by the sexologist Martin Cole – who was best known to the British public by his actually rather wonderful tabloid nickname Sex King Cole.

He spent several decades scandalising the establishment with his campaign for open and direct sex education and unstigmatised treatment of sexual dysfunction.

You can see the extent to which he rattled the self-appointed defenders of English morality by his mentions in parliamentary speeches made by concerned MPs who retold second-hand tales of scandal supposedly from Cole’s clinics.

This 1972 speech by MP Jill Knight veers from the melodramatic to the farcical as she describes how a sex surrogate “was with a client when a thunderous knocking occurred on the door and the glass panels in the door revealed a blue-clad figure topped by a policeman’s helmet. She knew at once that it was her fiance, who happened to be a policeman.”

If you want an up-to-date and level-headed discussion of surrogate partner therapy, an article by sex researcher Petra Boyton is a good place to start, and its something we’ve covered previously on Mind Hacks.

As for Cole, The Independent tracked him down, still working, in 1993, and wrote a somewhat wry profile of him.