Free Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences by Laura Carpenter Page B

sex (or otherwise avoid preg- nancy) during the 1960s expansion of higher education. 171 Yet, some dif- ferences persist into the present day. On average, African American ado- lescents become sexually active at earlier ages than Whites, who become sexually active before Latino/as, who in turn become sexually active be- fore Asian Americans. 172 Overall approaches to sexuality also appear to differ by race and ethnicity, with Black men tending to favor a recre- ational stance, Black women and Latinas thinking of sex in more tradi- tional/relational terms, and Latinos and Whites favoring a relational ap- proach. 173 However, recent studies suggest that socioeconomic status af- fects adolescents’ sexual conduct more profoundly than racial/ethnic background, with working-class and poor teens initiating sex earlier than their middle-class counterparts and, once sexually active, using birth con- trol less often. 174
    An ironic effect of the late-1960s shift toward more permissive stan- dards for virginity loss was an apparent increase in the number of youth, primarily women, who regretted losing their virginity so much that they decided to postpone further sexual encounters until some point in the fu- ture. Scholars in the 1970s called this pattern “regretful non-virginity” or “secondary virginity”; neither term caught on among lay people until the mid-1980s, when conservative Christian groups began to promote sec- ondary virginity and coined the synonym “born-again virginity.” 175
    The sexual revolution also inspired new approaches to petting. In the mid-century, heterosexual couples rarely engaged in fellatio and cun- nilingus before marriage, and then only after they had engaged in vaginal sex. 176 But as public discussions of sexuality became increasingly explicit and varied in content, more and more heterosexual Americans became

    aware of oral sex—popular media from Dr. Alex Comfort’s best-selling manual, The Joy of Sex (1972), to the pornographic crossover hit, Deep Throat (1972), positively celebrated it—and began incorporating oral sex into their own sexual repertoires. By the mid-1980s, many adolescent peer groups saw oral sex as an activity compatible with retaining (tech- nical) virginity. 177
    Yet another sexual sea-change that began in the late 1960s involved Americans’ understandings of homosexuality. Catalyzed by the riot that ensued when the New York police raided the gay bar, Stonewall Inn, in the summer of 1969, gay men and lesbians began to organize and vocally demand an end to their social and legal oppression. Key early victories in- cluded the American Psychiatric Association’s 1974 decision to drop ho- mosexuality from its list of mental disorders and the abolition of many state antisodomy laws.
    Like the generation before them, many gays and lesbians who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s began their sexual careers with different-sex partners and appeared to share the mainstream culture’s belief that vir- ginity loss was irrelevant to same-sex encounters. This belief is exempli- fied in nationally syndicated advice columnist Abigail (Dear Abby) Van Buren’s pronouncement, in 1983, to a young woman who’d “had a few affairs with females”: “Technically you are a virgin. . . . (A few lesbian ex- periences during one’s adolescence does not necessarily a lesbian make.)” 178 But the post-Stonewall generation developed its own stan- dards and rituals, including coming out: the public proclamation of one’s homosexual or bisexual identity that has since become an almost obliga- tory rite of passage for lesbigay women and men. 179 As the visibility of— and tolerance for—lesbigay sexuality increased, the average age at com- ing out declined significantly, from about 22 for gay men and 25 for les- bians in the early 1970s to about 17 and 20 (or even younger), respec- tively, in the mid-1990s. Equipped earlier to identify their own desires as well as potential same-sex