SF minister spreads gospel of sex in China

The Rev. Ted McIlvenna, whose pioneering work in the 1960s helped inspire the sexual revolution and the gay rights movement, has a new crusade.

Next month, the 80-year-old Methodist rebel will lead a delegation of 10 sex experts to China to help an emerging class of financially independent Chinese women achieve female sexual empowerment.

"The second sexual revolution is about female sexuality," said McIlvenna, a San Francisco preacher who owns what may be the world's largest collection of sex books, erotic art and vintage pornography. "And the women of China are starting to say, 'What about our sexuality?' "

McIlvenna's delegation includes experts from his Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, on Franklin Street, where scholars and sybarites have been studying sex since the 1970s.

They have been invited by Dr. Xiaonian Ma, deputy chairman of the China Sexology Association, to give a series of talks at the Advanced Sexology Conference in Guangzhou on March 6 and 7.

Among those making presentations will be Jane Hamilton, a former porn star better known in the 1980s as Veronica Hart.

'Get to the men'

In December, Hamilton got a stark look at the sexual status of Chinese women when she taught a "basic sex and intimacy" course to about 120 female spa owners who had gathered at a resort hotel outside Shanghai.

"These women have not been touched. They have not been hugged, cherished or loved," she said. "These are the wealthier women of China. They are successful entrepreneurs and they have zilch love life."

"But we also have to get to the men," Hamilton added. "There's no foreplay, no kissing, no loving. ... When the men find how much better sex can be when they have a loving and involved partner, that is when things will change."

Jian Chen, a Chinese sexologist and yoga teacher, said the Chinese government has begun to allow international conferences that feature frank discussions about sex - as long as the Americans involved show sensitivity to Chinese culture, politics and professional standards.

"Yes, the government will likely support this, or at least it won't interfere," said Chen, who studied at McIlvenna's institute. "Currently there is more emphasis on happiness and family health, but I hope there is a new openness to conferences like this."

Unusual preacher

Some people may be surprised to hear that a preacher and a porn star are teaming up to sexually liberate the People's Republic of China. But then those people probably don't know the life story of Ted McIlvenna.

McIlvenna began making headlines in San Francisco in 1964, when he and a small group of liberal Protestant ministers started the Council on Religion and the Homosexual to improve communications between churches and gays.

Working with the American Civil Liberties Union, McIlvenna - who was on the ministerial team at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church - campaigned to stop police harassment of gay people.

McIlvenna had been based out of the United Methodist Church headquarters in Nashville before Bishop Donald Tippett sent him to the Bay Area. "They brought me into San Francisco and said, 'Change the homosexuals into heterosexuals,' " McIlvenna said. "I said, 'You can't do that,' and told them they can't understand homosexuality without understanding human sexuality.

"Bishop Tippett warned me that if I continued my stand on homosexual rights I'd never be invited to preach in a Methodist Church, and I never have been. But I still considered myself a United Methodist clergyman."

In the late 1960s and early '70s, McIlvenna - then co-director of the National Sex and Drug Forum - called on the Methodist Church to move beyond the "thou shalt nots" of traditional Christian morality and take a more sex-positive stand for gays and straights. He published a book titled "Meditations on the Gift of Sexuality," which included so many sexually explicit photos that local seminaries refused to order it.

Expert porn witness

Meanwhile, McIlvenna found steady work as an expert witness in a long series of obscenity trials, offering testimony in support of California's burgeoning pornography trade. That's one reason why the Methodist minister wound up with a extensive collection of 1970s and '80s porn, which fills most of the rooms of his Franklin Street headquarters, not to mention 28 storage facilities across California and his Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas.

"Nobody else saves this stuff," said McIlvenna, setting aside a poster for "The Swinging Barmaids" while looking for his collection of antique Chinese "pillow books."

McIlvenna, who led an earlier delegation of American sexologists to China in 1996, hopes the time is right for change there.

"We have to provide for the Chinese everything we learned in our sexual revolution, including what the problems were," he said. "It was not always so good for American women. They were used in a lot of ways. Today, women are demanding intimacy and closeness."

'Orgasm in America'

Other members of the McIlvenna delegation include Leanna Wolfe, whose talk is titled "Orgasm in America," and Kat Smith, who will speak on "the way ahead in new technologies for intimacy training."

McIlvenna said that American society has finally begun moving away from condemning sexual experimentation as either sickness or sin - "that was how the medical establishment and the church used sex to control people" - and that it's time to spread the gospel overseas.

"What I try to do is to help people be honest about their sexuality," he said. "But it's very difficult to be honest when there is always someone out there judging you."

Source: http://feeds.sfgate.com/click.phdo?i=6f8ad43b9efb9392d0e954f4a240962a

juliette lewis chelsea handler mitch daniels shirataki noodles prince fielder state of the union address 2012 obama state of the union 2012