She stared at him, dazed and transfixed, and he went over and kneeled beside her, and took her two feet close in his two hands Then he looked up at her with that awful appeal in his full, glowing eyes. She was utterly incapable of resisting it. From her breast flowed the answering, immense yearning over him; she must give him anything, anything.
He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of every sound outside.
To her it meant nothing except that she gave herself to him.
-- Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
Constance Chatterley in love -- the quintessence of romantic adventure in which two people meet, lock eyes, feel an instant thrill of attraction and soon fall into passionate sex. Lady C.'s erotic enthusiasm caused D.H. Lawrence's novel to be banned as obscene not so long ago; the book was finally cleared in the U.S. in 1959. By then it could take its place on shelves crowded with explicit fiction that celebrated the new ideal of sexual behavior it had helped to inspire. Freedom, spontaneity, pleasure without guilt became the bywords of the liberated '60s and '70s, as many men and women evolved freewheeling rituals of courtship in singles bars, in casual affairs and in relationships in which the outcomes remained insouciantly negotiable.
Today, strangely enough, it is possible to imagine a future in which Lady Chatterley might again be banned for setting a harmful example, but this time in a grimly different sense. The specter of the deadly and incurable disease called AIDS -- acquired immunodeficiency syndrome -- has cast a shadow over the American sexual landscape. Since AIDS is chiefly transmitted through sex, it is forcing partners to a painful re-examination of their bedroom practices. The heedless abandon of Lawrencian lovers begins to seem dangerous and irresponsible, for oneself and for others. Instead of a transfixed gaze, lovers may feel they have to give each other a detailed grilling on present health and past liaisons.
At first AIDS seemed an affliction of drug addicts and especially of homosexuals, a "gay disease." No longer. The numbers as yet are small, but AIDS is a growing threat to the heterosexual population. Straight men and women in some cases do not believe it, in some cases do not want to believe it. But barring the development of a vaccine, swingers of all persuasions may sooner or later be faced with the reality of a new era of sexual caution and restraint.
There has been little time for comment or public debate about this particular impact of AIDS, but ominous news keeps emerging. Once figures have been fully reported, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta expects the number of deaths attributable to heterosexual transmission to have doubled in 1986. Right now, heterosexual infection -- among the sex partners of intravenous drug abusers, bisexuals or anyone who has the virus -- accounts for 3.8% of the 30,000 AIDS cases in the country, but that figure is expected to rise to 5.3% by 1991. Newly published studies on these male and female AIDS patients and their partners indicate that the disease is bidirectional, that is, passed on by both men and women.