To look at Roger you'd never imagine his secret, or the deep shame he has suffered because of it. He's an attractive man: light complexion, thinning blond hair, strong chin. He's a successful computer engineer. He has friendly dealings with co-workers and clients. He's smart, articulate and insightful, especially about the issue that makes him "a freak." He's a jazz drummer, and he showed enough acting talent in college to consider a theater career. He's well traveled, and has scuba-dived all over the Caribbean. But he's always been shy and never learned how to have an intimate relationship. "I never grew up in that way," he says.

Roger is not alone. There are no studies on the prevalence of virginity over 30, but many of the nation's sex therapists report a small, steady stream of older-virgin clients. During 23 years in practice, California psychologist David Johnston says he's counseled 50 middle-aged virgins, collaborating with various surrogate partners. "One was 72. A few have been women. But the vast majority have been men in their 30s or 40s."

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Steinberg is the creative force behind "Photo Sex: Fine Art Sexual Photography Comes of Age," a collection of 115 exuberantly erotic images by 31 of the world's leading sexual photographers. "Photo Sex," says New York photography critic A. D. Coleman, "represents a generational shift in the social acceptability of frankness about sexuality and its representation. It offers tangible evidence that the current administration in Washington in no way represents a majority of this country's electorate, who would, given a fair chance, reject its cultural neoconservatism. It shows us that this country's attitudes regarding matters sexual have changed radically, most probably, for the long term."

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The client was a regular, so she did not request her usual 10 percent deposit upfront. He said he would pay by check when she arrived in Chicago. That was a relief. Monet, 42, never discusses her fee, but says that other jet-set escorts typically charge several thousand dollars for a one-day date -- and she dislikes flying home with that much cash. Like most of her other clients, this man was white, married, around 50. A well-educated, self-made multimillionaire. He was into art, so on the way to the airport, she picked up a few art magazines to immerse herself in his interest. At SFO, a round-trip business-class e-ticket was waiting for her.

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But few Americans have read it -- not even the "good parts," the sexual positions that made the book famous, but that account for only about one-quarter of its length (46 of 172 pages). Even those who have read the major English translation of the "Kamasutra" have not fully appreciated the book because that translation -- how can I put this delicately? Well, it sucks. It dates from 1883 and was published just once in the U.S., 40 years ago in 1962. Richard Burton, the British army officer responsible for it, was the editor from hell. He altered the text considerably to shoehorn it into Victorian views about sexuality, notably the then popular notions that only men experience sexual desire and pleasure, and that women are nothing more than the passive recipients of men's lust.

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Betty Dodson, 72, and Eric Wilkinson, 25, are not Harold and Maude, but their age difference invites comparisons. When they became an item three years ago, friends teased them about the movie -- which appeared several years before Wilkinson was born.

"I never even heard of it till I got involved with Betty," Wilkinson explains. "But there's no comparison. Harold and Maude were just friends. We're lovers. We've spent entire days in bed together."

"Oh sure, we got Harold-and-Maude teasing," Betty recalls. "So, I'm so much older. But so what? When men have girlfriends or marry much younger women, no one bats an eye. But the other way around is a big deal. What we have here is a sexual double standard. The teasing stopped pretty quickly when our friends and families accepted our relationship. In our social circle, things feel comfortable now."

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At the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, a team led by noted virus researcher Samuel Baron, M.D., a professor of microbiology, has discovered what could be another promising way to reduce risk of HIV transmission -- three safe, inexpensive, widely available sexual lubricants.

With financing from the National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation and the University of Texas, Baron's team mixed small amounts of 22 over-the-counter sexual lubricants with similar amounts of HIV-infected semen. A day later, the semen was analyzed for the presence of HIV using virus-counting methods standard in AIDS research. Three of the lubricants reduced HIV replication by more than 99.9 percent. Results of the study were published in November in one of the many peer-reviewed medical journals rarely read by the news media or the public, "AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses." Salon read the report and interviewed Baron by phone.

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Lund pondered possible reasons for the abrupt change in sexual desire. "I was working long hours for a start-up. But I'd had intense jobs for years. My problem didn't seem connected to anything at work. Steve and I had been together awhile, and over time, sexual intensity usually diminishes. But this was more than cooling. All of a sudden, I was in the freezer. Honestly, I had no idea why I lost my libido. But it was like I was a car whose engine would grind and grind but never quite turn over."

Lund's husband, Steve, then 35 and in the process of switching careers from health care to law enforcement, wasn't pleased with having sex just once a month. He and Hendy remained close and committed to one another, but agreed that the libido loss strained their marriage.

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To Dr. Satcher's credit, he takes some modestly progressive stands on sexuality: Homosexuals are human beings. Sexual orientation can't be changed. Abstinence-based school sex education programs don't work. Kids should be taught about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). And in the real world, sex often begins before marriage.

But in the same report, the surgeon general also takes some sexually conservative stands: Abstinence is the best way to deal with the threats of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. Sex before marriage is OK only in the context of a committed, enduring, monogamous relationship.

The progressive elements are news only to the hopelessly clueless. And the conservative elements pander to the current powers that be. Basically, the new report is a hopeless mishmash of contradictory platitudes that will be forgotten by the time the ink is dry on tomorrow's headlines.

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Within the bounds of self-revelation comfort levels, I'm pretty well informed about the sexual issues in several of the marriages in our group. But I'm relatively unaware of my friends' masturbation habits. And I haven't discussed mine. If the subject comes up, which it rarely does, there is nervous laughter along with acknowledgment that we all indulge.

It's not hard to understand why it's easier to discuss partner sex than the solo variety. Our culture is obsessed with partner sex. Depictions of it are ubiquitous, in both positive images (movies, books, music) and negative (AIDS, STDs and controversy over sex education and federal funding for family planning). Masturbation is still largely in the closet. It occupies the position partner sex held in the 1950s -- it's simply not discussed.

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In Gardos' view, one hopeful development for increasing access to information about sexuality is the Web: "For the first time ever, people with Web access are only a few clicks away from at least some good sex information. Before the Web, if you were a teen in a small, conservative town, or gay, or a fetishist of some sort, it may have been very difficult to find the information you were looking for. [Now] you can ask your questions, find people like you. People submit questions to Thrive anonymously, but from the way they're written, I'd guess that about half come from teens. I think that's why I get so many questions asking: 'Could I be pregnant?'"

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"I've been scanning the personal ads, and I've come across a few abbreviations I don't understand. Can you explain: BBW, HWP, GS and WFW?"

"Are there any products that can keep my nipples erect? I sometimes like the look of my erect nipples showing through my clothing. What do you suggest besides ice cubes?"

"I keep coming across the term 'fisting' but have been too shy to actually ask anyone what it is. Is it pretty much what it sounds like or is there more to it?"

These are just some of the thousands of questions the nation's sex advice columnists receive every month. Chip Rowe, who writes the Advisor column in Playboy, fields some 500 a month. He and two colleagues answer every one of them and select about a dozen for publication in the magazine and on the Playboy Advisor Web site. Louanne Weston, a sex therapist in Fair Oaks, Calif., gets 1,500 questions a month as the Sex Matters advice columnist for OnHealth.com (recently acquired by WebMD). San Francsico sexuality authority Sandor Gardos receives 2,500 questions a week as the sex advice columnist for Thriveonline/Oxygen. That's 10,000 a month. "Answering sex questions is a dirty job," Playboy's Rowe says, "but someone has to do it."

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To make matters worse, the erotic stories in sex publications such as Penthouse imply that every woman self-lubricates like Niagara Falls at the wink of an alluring eye: "Just being near Bill made my panties wet." Not only is this way off the mark, but it has led to a destructive corollary, the notion that if a woman does not produce much natural lubrication, she is neither turned on by her lover nor committed to the relationship.

Instant gushing lubrication may happen to some women. But it's much more common for a woman to feel committed to her relationship and erotically aroused by her lover, and still not self-lubricate much, if at all.

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He knew that she loved to be caressed lightly all over with just his fingertips, loved to have him nibble on her earlobes while whispering sexy intentions, loved his lips and tongue playing first with one nipple, then the other, and particularly loved his tongue swirling on her clitoris, around her vulva and inside her.

She knew that he loved the noises she made when aroused, loved it when she ran her fingernails from the top of his head down his neck and back and over his butt, loved the way she climbed on him when he lay on his back and sat on his penis, and particularly loved the way she sucked its head while stroking the shaft with one hand and cupping his balls in the other.

He always waited until she was good and wet to enter her and, during intercourse, they both enjoyed a slow, sensual rhythm, alternating fucking with tongue play until they alternated orgasms.

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The two groups' views appear diametrically opposed. But based on my five years of experience in family planning and teen sex education, and 25 years of writing about sexuality, it has become clear to me that the two sides are not the Hatfields and the McCoys. They're actually Romeo and Juliet, hailing from feuding clans but mainly in bed with each other. This may be a shock to readers with only a newspaper's-eye view of sexual politics, but when it comes to teens and sex, liberals and conservatives have very similar core values. Neither of their approaches to sex education makes sense (though the liberal view is a tad more realistic). And neither of their programs does much except create fear of sex.

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But in addition to typical antidepressant side effects -- nausea, nervousness, insomnia, diarrhea, dry mouth and tremor (hand shaking) -- the SSRIs have become notorious for causing sex problems: libido loss, weak orgasms, difficulty in reaching or inability to reach orgasm and, in men, erection impairment. Depending on the study, 50 to 80 percent of SSRI users report at least one sexual side effect. Many SSRI users insist they are willing to forgo sexual satisfaction to escape from the horrors of depression. But others are unhappy about SSRI-induced sex problems.

Unfortunately, few people know that another antidepressant, Wellbutrin (chemical name: bupropion), is as effective as the SSRIs -- but much less likely to cause sexual side effects. And most don't know that several studies have shown that Wellbutrin has sex-enhancing effects.

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"I wish I knew," sighs Louanne Cole-Weston, a sex therapist in the Sacramento, Calif., area, who is the "Sex Matters" columnist for OnHealth.com. "But I'll tell you one thing: There's a surprising amount of interest in pubic hair removal. The recent column I did on it got more responses than anything else I've ever written for 'Sex Matters' -- and not just from women. Many men are interested in getting rid of their pubic hair, too. I was surprised at all the interest."

It's not easy to track the history of pubic presentation. Ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman erotic art generally depict genitals -- both male and female -- without pubic hair. Did the ancients remove it? Or did the artists simply not include it? Art historians are silent on the subject.

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A lot of addicts have come to that turning point where they must change their lives or lose everything they care about. But the problem was that Wilkerson had been there before. Again and again. Despite the birth of six children whom she loved, and repeated attempts to commit herself to rehab, she never was able to stop. She'd been addicted to crack since she was a teenager and she'd just about resigned herself to a miserable fate.

But when New York child welfare authorities seized her children and placed them in foster homes, the 36-year-old decided to try one last time to escape the drug that had destroyed her life.

"I went to court," she explains, "and they told me the only way I could get my kids back was to stop using. They gave me a list of rehab programs, including the acupuncture program at Lincoln Hospital, which sounded good to me. At Lincoln, they put the little needles in my ears. I had no drug cravings. It was amazing. I've been off drugs for two years now. I have a good job, and I got my kids back."

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During their 37 years of marriage, Ann and Julian raised three children. Ann trained as a speech pathologist and worked part-time while their children were growing up. The children went off to college, and later their daughter produced three grandchildren.

Over the decades, Ann adjusted to her husband's workaholic preoccupation with his career, admiring his intellect and fretting with him over his lectures, grant applications, journal articles, committee responsibilities, and the vagaries of academic politics. Of course, she got annoyed when she realized, too frequently, that Julian was not giving her his undivided attention. She did not like to repeat herself or say, "Julian, listen," because he was off in some physiological reverie instead of focusing on her. He was the classic absent-minded professor. Ann was forever reminding him not to forget his briefcase, or his keys, or his brothers' birthdays, or the dinner or concert date they had in the evening.

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