Sex In The Trump White House - Young, White, Great Gatsby Parties Are Back

Sex in the back seat of cars has been part of the American experience since time immemorial - or at least since flivvers replaced the horse and buggy; and even then young New Yorkers trotting around the park in their broughams and phaetons found some way to do it.  

 

'A '47 Ford', said Herbie Manx's grandfather. 'Unforgettable', and went on to tell the young man about making love with Linda Larkin on the golf course one starlit summer night. The rocking and pitching of their bodies jostled the monkey wrench, hammer, and pliers left on the floor where his father had left them, the car loud and wild with Linda's moans and the clatter of hardware. 

'Not in your day, I'm sure', said old Isaiah Manx now well into his nineties but sharp as a tack and in a confessional mood as he often was now that he was in the last decades of his life; but there was nothing morbid or morose about the man. Just the opposite. His eyes lit up as he wrapped his arms about the invisible and long gone but not forgotten Linda Larkin and told the boy, 'She was wonderful, just wonderful'.

Herbie's grandfather was right - today assignations were in the bedrooms of Dupont Circle walkups, rooms at the Mayflower, or suites in South Beach - easy going in a sexually liberated age. 

Yet the old days when Isaiah Manx was young was no prudish, inhibited time.  It might have been so on he surface - Father Murphy harangued his congregation with images of hellfire and damnation awaiting the sexual sinner, and little girls were brought up to be demure and patient - but behind the scenes, New Brighton was as seamy and rutting as any generation before or after. 

Mrs. Albertson, for example, was a model of moral probity.  Chairwoman of the Ladies Auxiliary, volunteer at the hospital, Girl Scout leader, and charming hostess, she had another life, one with the sexual lid off and the pot boiling.  Her affairs were well-known - the one with Frank Zackin, the pharmacist drew special attention not for the illicitness of the relationship but because of the venue.  Tommy Burdick saw them 'doing it' through a basement window, but because Mrs. Albertson was so beautiful, and Zackin was this old hairy-nosed, ugly Jew, no one believed him. 

Then there was Hedy Fanning, amateur golf champion, high school teacher, who found the woods behind the 12th hole, carpeted with pine needles, secluded, and shady the right place for sex with the club pro.  His wife, so gifted with flowers and chocolates (her husband never forgot a birthday or their anniversary) never suspected a thing until the cries of a screech owl one night sent the pro and Hedy running buck naked onto the fairway, spotted by a lonely midnight walker. 

This is beside the point since Herbie Manx was way beyond fairway sex or the back seat of cars.  He was a White House aide, a member of the staff of a president whose reform went beyond taxes and immigration and extended to cultural affairs.  He had expressly picked young, blonde, blue-eyed women to run his personal affairs. Their jobs were little more than scullery work, but they were were delighted to serve; and from the President's perspective they were on staff to show America that white, young beauty was back and that the Biden era of dykes and fat ladies was over and done with. 

It would be unfair to say that the President pimped for his staff, but he certainly encouraged the kind of heterosexual love between gilded, privileged young Americans that had always been the country's hallmarks.  He had squired the most beautiful women in the world, married one of them - a woman of class and quite elegance - and was anxious to show off this magical world of white beauty, European sexual freedom, and male virility to the rest of America.

 

The President, now approaching eighty, might be close to his sexual pull-by date, but this harem of desirous young women was, if not the Fountain of Youth, a rejuvenating elixir.  You could breathe sex in the anterooms, the aides' quarters, and the conference rooms.  Inviting looks, invitations, seductive compliments, and the graceful pas de deux of young lovers were back. The years of progressive racial hammering, hectoring, and shaming was over. 

It was in this heady, delightful, unfettered world of the Trump White House that Herbie was at his happiest. It was Woodstock revisited and cleaned up - sex without dampness and yurts.  It was sex in topsiders, tanned and pert, Nantucket and Palm Beach.  He remembered his grandfather telling him about the commune he had lived in the Idaho panhandle.  Sex was abundant but required, a catharsis after the Fifties' prudery, a union card, an entry ticket. Woodstock delinked sex and romance; but the love the one you're became incidental, routine, and even boring.

 

This new world of F. Scott Fitzgerald Roaring Twenties sexuality was different.  Pairing off was not de rigeur, but sought after.  The age-old sexual game of pursuit and conquest was deliberately acted; and because it was played in a society where there was no longer any opprobrium against sexual freedom, it was all the more exciting.  You knew and didn't know whether consummation was in the cards.  The elegant dance of courtship was back, and because all traces of Woodstock had been removed and replaced by sexual intimation only, it was irresistibly sensual. 

It was the best the modern era could do.  While old man Manx's back seat experiences were never to be repeated - stolen sex is a retired term - this new, marvelously invented retro sexuality was close. If the lovers were good actors, then the suspension of disbelief was unnoticed.  Consummation was a by-product of the romance. 

The President was aware of all this, and encouraged it.  The love affairs between blonde, blue-eyed women and their mates was the point - whiteness was back, heterosexual sex was again the norm, and the restoration of romance as dramatically produced as it might be, was the new American ethos.  Romance meant a final burying of diversity, identity and inclusivity.  The recalling if not the reincarnation of Petrarchan romance, the image of the beautiful, desirable, irresistible woman and her defiant lover, was more than a sexual restatement.  It was at the heart of the new social restoration. 

It was the best of times for Herbie Manx - a perfect world of youth, intelligence, ambition, and romance,  the Sonnets with a nod to Coeur d'Alene, the full bore of down-to-earth sexual desire, courting, and achievement. 

Of all the things about Donald Trump that progressives never understood, this is the one that completely escaped them.  They missed the point, in their terms the 'conflation' of culture, normal sexuality, and history.  Their vision was limited by the most superficial of political pauses - women of color, men of indeterminate sex, a hodge-podge, a mess. 

Meanwhile the lights in the White House were on again and blazing.  The glittering lawn parties of the Great Gatsby were back.