Robert A. Heinlein, whose 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land is considered one of the classics of the sexual revolution, packed more practical advice into any of his novels than most self-help books published before or since. Take, for example, a mini-essay of his on the best way to lie. An amateur liar — Heinlein informed us — just tells falsehoods. A better liar tells the truth but only part of the truth. An expert liar, Heinlein taught me, is one who tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — the requirements for being able to swear under oath without committing perjury — but he tells the truth so unconvincingly that everyone is convinced he’s lying.

Bill Clinton was only a moderately good liar when he told the world, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” If you look up the meaning of “sexual relations” in a dictionary suitable for use in a court of law, it has the specific meaning of “sexual intercourse.” That definition doesn’t cover blow jobs, which is of course why getting a Lewinsky became, for a while, a synonym for that sexual practice which by dictionary definition is not actually sex.

There is a good reason to consider “sexual relations” sex and blows jobs not sex. Sexual relations can effect a pregnancy. A blow job — unless a woman has a hither-to-undiscovered gastroenterological tract — can not.

So for the purposes of discussing human sexuality, we need to start by distinguishing behavior which can make a baby from behavior that can make an orgasm.

Bringing out the old Venn diagrams, you have your A Circle containing all behavior that can make a baby. The B Circle contains all behavior that can make an orgasm. The A and B circles overlap. Our professor of symbolic logic then asks us to make some true statements. 1. Some babies can be made without orgasms. 2. Some orgasms can happen without making a baby. 3. Some orgasms make babies.

It’s somewhere between mildly amusing and astonishing to me that in writing a chapter on sex intended for grown-ups — that is, humans past puberty, many of whom reading this have engaged in both sex and sexual practices, and have even made babies — that I have to start by giving an elementary-school health-class lecture on the Birds and the Bees. But the sad fact is that all of our language today has become so polluted by political spin that if I don’t provide clear definitions I can’t speak truth to power.

To begin with, same-sex couples can’t fuck. Heterosexuals have a monopoly on fucking. Fucking, for all its extra definitions, has a core definition — like sexual relations — of sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse, being the biological process by which terrestrial mammalian primate human beings reproduce, requires one-each penis and vagina, with the penis ejaculating sperm-rich semen into a vagina leading to an ova-rich uterus. If the penis’s ejaculation is directed into any other passageway or container — a mouth, an anus, a condom, or a Kleenex — it’s not sexual intercourse. It may get very close to being sexual intercourse — particularly in the case of fucking with a condom, which only has a 90% success rate of preventing the semen from entering the vagina — but if we’re not going to fuck around with language, it’s not fucking.

It’s paradoxical that today’s Religious Puritans agree with their political nemeses, the Gays — that Circle B activities are sex.

It’s also ironic that the old Soviet Communists were just as puritanical.

Now, I’m a lucky guy. Truly blessed. God made me so my passions — my desires, my obsessions — match up with my biological architecture. I want to stick my penis into vaginas.

I can understand why some gay men might feel God fucked them over. They want to stick their penises into the mouths and anuses of other men, but women’s vaginas have no appeal for them. They’re full of sperm, all dressed with no place to go. This mismatch between soul and body has got to just suck.

I have a news flash for gays, both male and female. God isn’t the only Player. And since God is Good, you might start looking around for some other Player — known for being Not Good — to blame for fucking up the soul-body connection.

But speaking for myself — and leaving God way the fuck out of it — I’m more than a little envious about the whole gay pride thing.

Let me start by admitting that my passion for women doesn’t just involve wanting to fuck them. I also want to engage in other sexual activities with women that doesn’t always involve my inserting my penis into their vaginas. Or at least not only inserting my penis into their vaginas. Or before I insert my penis into their vaginas.

These are activities which fall on the Venn diagram not into Circle A but into Circle B.

We need a new slang term other than “fucking” for the activities in Circle B. The word “fetish” might work, but fetish has bad connotations of men in dark raincoats. When it comes to rain gear I’ve always been the Philip Marlowe light-colored Burberry trench coat sort of guy.

I think the two closest terms for Circle B activities I’ve been able to come up with — and keep in mind that I’m close to four decades in as a professional writer — are “sex play” and “love play.”

You need a new slang term for Circle B activities other than fucking? Going through the alphabet looking for null English rhymes, how about kucking?

Works for me.

I’m here to defend the rights of all post-pubescent biological adults to engage not only in Circle A baby-producing activities — fucking — but also to defend all Circle B consentual adult sex play and love play — kucking.

So Gay Men, please feel free to go kuck yourselves. I’ve got your back. Just not too close, thanks.

But I also feel that gays have precisely no more and no less right to feel pride in their Circle B lifestyles than do any other practitioners of Circle B sex and love play.

I want equal pride for my non-gay fetishes!

In this book so far I’ve given some examples of human passions that authoritarian tyrants work to suppress. I believe the reason they suppress these passions has nothing to do with what the passions are for, but merely because — being pleasurable — it provides a means of getting leverage over human beings that can be used to control them, make them do things for you, and to take the fruits of their labors and transfer wealth from your pockets into theirs.

Controlling both fucking — through marriage and age-of-consent laws — and kucking — through laws and codes regulating sex play and love play — may have competition only from dietary codes (my very next chapter!) when it comes to tyrannizing human beings.

The default position for orthodox or fundamentalist cultures based on the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions is: no kucking allowed. Some cultures based on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions have attempted even to restrict fucking to a single sexual position — the so-called missionary position — and even to prohibit nude bodily contact between husband and wife during sexual intercourse.

These are some crazy muthahs!

I believe in God but few people believe in me when I state that I am just as hostile to dogmatic religion as I was when for the first three decades of my life I was an atheist. I recently found myself on lists of libertarians who are “religious.”

You have got to be shitting me.

If you learn nothing else about the author of this book, learn well the following: I am not religious.

I pray because it’s a convenient way for me to uplink with God.

A couple of times a year — Passover and Channukah — I celebrate observances of my family’s Jewish traditions.

I eat ham and lobster.

I don’t fast on Yom Kippur — it screws up my dieting.

I find some religious scriptures to contain stories seminal to my cultural matrix, and use them when useful. But I accept no religion’s orthodoxy as authoritative, no scripture as infallible.

When it comes to the sexual and dietary codes deriving from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures I consider them nothing less than psychotically demented: Unfit for Human Consumption.

Keep in mind that you’re getting this statement not from an atheist or an agnostic but from a man who publicly asserts that he has had a direct revelation from God and who considers that most adherents of organized religion would discard God — including their Savior — in a New York minute if upon his personal appearance he challenged their church’s dogmas or their scripture’s inerrancy.

My reading is that from God’s point of view scripture is a record that over and over and over every time God has gifted men with a messenger, the message has initially been rejected in preference to previously adopted human writings. Then the revised message becomes a new dogma, as blindly followed as the old. Much of modern religious practice strikes me as idolatry: worshiping writings over God.

I’m a writer. I know the difference. I choose God.

Whether you agree with the back story for our Comic Book that God designed our biological matrix — and by the way that doesn’t preclude anything Mr. Darwin, Mr. Spencer, or Mr. Dawkins have written if you believe launching a new space-time continuum can contain the DNA to evolve an entire universe — or you believe we’re all just lucky to be here, our ability to experience physical rapture in almost infinite variation is the greatest perk of being born human.

Whatever gets you off — so long as all players are biologically mature and conscientious consenters, and doesn’t spread plagues — is your business.

Next in Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto is Chapter VII: Eat Your Veggies!