Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End

Roiphe (The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism) believes that the AIDS epidemic has led the guardians of public virtue to foster a new code of sexual morality stressing abstinence, monogamy, condoms and safe sex, a code that plays upon Americans' fundamentally puritanical distrust of pleasure and on our anxious ambivalence about sexuality. Among other points in this collection of original essays, she argues that the media have exaggerated the dangers of white, middle-class heterosexual transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). One piece instructively contrasts Savage Nights, a French movie about a bisexual filmmaker dying of AIDS, with Philadelphia, ""America's own unimpeachably responsible AIDS movie."" Other articles focus on Magic Johnson; Roiphe's sex-education lectures in a New Jersey high school; and the illness and death of Alison Gertz, who appeared on Oprah to explain how she became infected with the HIV virus after a one-night stand. In the most personally revealing piece, Roiphe discloses her family's trauma when her sister, Emily, a former heroin addict now in recovery, tested positive for HIV. While the ideas in these sometimes-repetitive essays tend to verge on pop psychology, the author is a lively, thought-provoking writer. Author tour. (Mar.)