In 1996, Young was awarded a $5,000 individual artist fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, a small organization that received 7.7 percent of its funding from the NEA that year. The resulting book, "One of the Guys," tells the story of a down-and-out San Diego sex arcade janitor, Miles Derry, who discovers the dead body of a homosexual Navy chaplain in a porn video stall. In an attempt to find some sort of new life, Derry impersonates the man and sets out to sea on the USS Warren Harding. As one of the ship's chaplains, he is privy to the tormented moral confessions of the men aboard, as well as the often scandalous norms of Navy life -- most significantly, the rollicking "liberty weekends" in the Far East, where sailors engage in sex acts with underage prostitutes.

Deeming the book "horror art" in a press release, the AFA complained about Young's titillating material, particularly a description of a young woman extracting razor blades from her vagina during a performance in a sex club. The AFA's national office, whose Web site points to "Temptation Island" and Disney's "homosexual agenda" as other major threats to "traditional family values," is most famous for its powerful campaigns against the public funding of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Serrano in the late '80s. The AFA's Web site boasts, "Since the AFA began asking Congress to eliminate funding for the NEA, the agency's funds have been reduced to $100 million per year."

The AFA's national office declined to talk about "One of the Guys." But Barry Sheets, director of the Ohio branch of the AFA, explained that a number of Ohio citizens had contacted his office and questioned why their tax dollars should fund such a book.

"The material that the author was putting forward doesn't seem to have a very legitimate artistic purpose that tax dollars should be used to subsidize," said Sheets, who has not read the book and is in the process of lobbying local legislators to rally against funding such works. "It seemed more scatological than anything else. I don't have much background on Mr. Young, but I would doubt that he has much experience with the military. I don't gather that he has ever served his country in the military, but I don't know that he hasn't."

As Young would later explain in a December 2000 Washington Post editorial, however, his book wasn't intended simply to purvey sensationalized sex acts. "One of the Guys" depicts the sort of behavior Young witnessed firsthand as a civilian college instructor on a Navy ship during the summers of 1987 and 1988.

"I tried to explore the interplay between cultures," Young told Salon from Sacramento, Calif. "You have one dominant culture whose people are walking down the street with $20 in their pockets -- more than the people of the less dominant culture make in a year. That's the impact of the United States through its military."

During the 177 days he was at sea, Young held a rank equivalent to a Navy lieutenant commander and taught remedial English courses to the Navy men on board who were providing support for Marines training in the Thai jungle. Young witnessed his shipmates take part in sex acts with young women in such exotic destinations as Pattaya Beach, Thailand, and Manila, Philippines. Pattaya Beach -- which the Toronto Star once called a "cross between Acapulco and Coney Island" -- is well known for its ample sexual entertainment. Anywhere from 80,000 to 200,000 child prostitutes work throughout Thailand, according to UNICEF, and 1 million children in Asia are involved in commercial sexual exploitation.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"