To the other queer people I knew, sex was the most important thing in the world, and it seemed to mean radically different things to everybody. Though I wasn’t a virgin when I moved to New York, I definitely didn’t know what I was doing, and I was tremendously curious about sex. I was trying to sleep with as many men as possible, and I was writing short stories about the experiences in a zine. I didn’t read Jong’s Fear of Flying until I was well out of college, living in New York. In retrospect, this was probably a fair enough introduction, not unlike learning about disco icons from drag impersonators, or being educated in the Broadway diva canon by bitter but patient show queens. I would rather write googoo.” By the end of the two page screed, Erica Jong becomes a cipher through which she vents (possibly her own) sexual frustration. Acker gives a mock impersonation: “I would rather be a baby than have sex. She parodies the title of Jong’s sophomore novel ( How to Save Your Own Life) as How to Die Successfully.

If Kathy Acker thought she was worth making fun of, then I did too. I figured Erica Jong was some uptight square, a bourgeois celebrity writer whose work struck Acker as worthy of scorn. I was only a little curious about Erica Jong, singled out as she was for Acker’s ire. I’m sure I had heard of the “zipless fuck” or Fear of Flying before, but my first real introduction to Erica Jong was when I read Kathy Acker’s scathing 1982 piece, Hello, I’m Erica Jong in my senior year of college.

Zipless: A Queer Look at Erica Jong’s ‘Fear of Flying’

Fear of flying jong