But in 1975 this handsome radical was murdered at a mysterious roadblock—his body riddled by automatic fire. Even so, he'd lived to see most of his dreams come true, traveling throughout the world—from Rio to Hong Kong, and from Cape Town to the roof of Europe. He was a deeply spiritual man, the wisest I've ever known. This inward spirit of his, I know, was what made him so strikingly handsome.

Things Lige had discovered about life, he often told me, came mostly from small-town experiences he'd known growing up in the Kentucky mountains. Not far from Hazard was Hindman, population 700.

One piece of hillbilly wisdom he sometimes offered was "Don't compare!" He meant this especially in situations when judgments are hastily made about a newly-met person simply because he or she has, in some particular respect, an imagined likeness to some other known person. Was Lige, a long-ago gay-lib pioneer, also a forerunner of Sex Panic! style liberation? Are there comparisons to be made?

Sex Panic!, newly met, is working to become a strategic force, hopefully composed of networks and think tanks, vigorously countering the reactionary forces of neo-puritanism now growing in both gay and straight environs, forces using AIDS as an excuse to foreclose on the Holy House of Sexual Freedom.

In the light of recent developments, I haven't been able to resist wondering, "What would Lige Clarke have said about debates between the so-called neo-cons (or neo-puritans) and the sex lib folks meeting as they did at this month's San Diego sex-lib conference and addressing what the sex-libbers are calling society's Sex Panic!

How did Clarke—a quarter century ago—address sex issues such as are now prevalent? To understand him, it helps to realize that in sex matters, repression and puritan madness had previously enjoyed too much a crippling foothold in the good ol' USA..

Sexual congress in natural settings was among 1969's joys that Clarke extolled in a book, writing of a particular "supreme beach" as the "glory of the South" where, in the far woods, nature took desired courses in what surely had to be "God's garden before Eve was created."

Sprawled on the sand, he'd noted, were hosts of inviting bachelors, some leaning against driftwood deposits, some locked in communicative passions but hidden by foliage, some sauntering along tropical trails.

Clarke's realizations about sexual deprivation, he explained, underwent major developments when he began—in 1968-- working in the offices of SCREW, the outrageous granddaddy of America's sex freedom tabloids. Until then, he'd said, he'd never realized how many of today's men and women have virtually no means of obtaining affectionate sexual contact.

"All my life," Clarke explained, "I've enjoyed sexual abundance." And it was true that both men and women among all sexual types seemed drawn to him.

"Its' funny," he wrote, "how often we assume that the joy of our own lives is somehow shared by others. While we eat a tasty meal, it's difficult to visualize 20^th century children, elsewhere, who are starving to death."

Religious scruples never caught Lige Clarke's fancy, though in the small town where he was reared, Sunday evening church revivals—unbeknownst to the minister-- were good cause for rejoicing.

"While adults praised the Lord inside the church," he laughed, "we young'uns, more practical by far, enjoyed automobile orgies in the parking lot out back. At an early age, you know, mountaineers often do a great deal of exploring."

"There weren't much else to do up in them hollers," he joked, "Some called it spelunking. I called it corn-holing."

Even so, he noted, the Baptists wouldn't allow such good times to go on forever. By the time small-town Kentuckians reached twenty, he lamented, "life was almost over" for them. They'd marry. On the advice of a mother, she'd fatten him bigtime during their first year together so other women wouldn't lust for him, tempting him, her much-needed meal ticket, to wander.

Clarke, who considered himself privileged by Kentucky standards, never got over a passionate concern about the welfare of his county-folk, hating the incredible poverty they knew, as he'd observed it affect them during his formative years in Appalachia.

"Early marriages," he complained, had become "a must." At 24, Clarke was the only member of his high school graduating class who hadn't tied the nuptial knot. "Thank god," he sighed.

When he returned thereafter to his beloved Kentucky for visits, he told of seeing "deep scars of frustration etched on the faces of boyhood friends." He noted that the sparkle of their early years had vanished. He marveled at how the fellows whose sexual company he'd enjoyed on Sundays were now seated inside the churches while their young-uns fiddled with each other in the parking lots outside.

A few locals regarded the handsome hometown- visitor with suspicion. "How come you're not fat? How come you're not married?" Others said, "There's something quare about that Clarke boy. Ain't natural for a man not to get married."

A couple of old buddies took him aside to ask what they thought was a "man to man" question: "Hey, Lige, did you ever do it with a colored woman?"

Before leaving Kentucky's hills (to get away he joined the Army and—with 11 security clearances-- he edited secret messages in the Pentagon office of the Army Joint Chief of Staff) Clarke had thought that the strict sexual and moral codes he'd known were limited to his home town's turf. After all, he'd seen some promising movies and, on the tube, had heard a spate of provocative songs. He'd read a few good books too, widening his horizons.

"I assumed that it was only the hills I'd escaped that were out of step. Little did I know that men and women—people from the middle, upper middle and upper classes were sad victims of the puritan heritage to even greater degrees. In the mountains, at least, we had learned to fuck wildly—at an early age, both heterosexually and homosexually. We were in touch with our bodies."

In the cities, Clarke said, he discovered that "the curse of John Calvin was nailed to almost every door. Calvin's idea of a good time was sleeping on a board." The gloomy sexual codes, he noticed, were colored by national adherence to orthodox religious codes, which, he believed, "petrified" sexual communication. These codes, he wrote, "combined with strict city toilet training (mountaineers are outdoor quick shitters) and had created an urban blight: an anally retentive population whose members can find no relief with Preparation H from their spastic colons."

"The message of sexual liberation falls hard on such ears," he noted, "The Puritan mentality dies a slow death. It is hard for men and women to admit that their behavior codes are lies; that they have long been 'controlling' themselves, denying themselves, 'behaving' themselves and frustrating themselves for no good reason."

Clarke reasoned that "to face the fact that they have missed out on life's most intriguing pleasures is more than they can bear. Jealousy, envy, and a thousand fantasies they'll never have the courage to live, converge on them, exploding with an intense rage that a sexually sane person finds incomprehensible." Life, he observed, "has passed them by and they can't abide another's joy."

When Clarke moved to Manhattan in 1968 and began working for the alternative press , these realizations hit him with unbridled force. He saw—as publishers and friends were arrested for "obscenity"-- how the Establishment could not abide magazines and newspapers that playfully examined the sexual fantasies of the man in the street.

"And the man in the street," wrote Clarke, "is hungry, painfully hungry, for a taste of sexual freedom."

"Society," he noted, "plays cruel, heartless tricks" on such people. Their alternatives to chaste dates and inhospitable spouses were "hideously painted prostitutes—nightmares in an upside-down carnival!"

"Before he (such a conventional person) can fuck," Clarke complained, "he must buy a license, and allow some benighted clergyman mumble words over his head. Then, of course, he's caught in a financial trap from which escape is made as difficult as possible."

"The average straight man," he believed, "is surrounded by an army of sex-starved gossips: 'Mary's boyfriend, John, is supposed to be true to her but he's been screwing Joanne on the side.' "

In a small town such gossip seemed intolerable to Clarke. If Mary was married, he knew, the gossip became even juicier. Husbands and wives spent, he said, a great deal of time worrying about each other's sexual fidelity. Society seemed to be forcing both the married and the unmarried to seek explicit sexual contacts under the most bizarre and tawdry circumstances.

"Can we deny that the new sexual experiments now taking place are valuable?" he wanted to know.

Clarke was wary of sex for procreation only, especially in the wake of church assaults on condoms. He insisted that regarding sex as pleasure "must now replace sex for baby-making as a sane ideal" in our overcrowded world.

Looking forward to the emergence of " wonderful" new sexual patterns, Lige Clarke celebrated little-known principles he thought would be needed to assure the success of the sexual revolution he represented. He left behind the makings of a manifesto:

Lige Clarke was not an assimilationist. He looked to a day when humanity might be free from "ancient taboos and 'heterosexual' bondage." Petty jealousies, he wrote, " 'butch fem' role playing, and the concept of sexual ownership (i.e. I own your genitals and you may use them only with me) must be stamped from our consciousness. Heterosexual patterns must not be copied."

"Millions of unhappy slaves to the system," Clarke believed, "are waiting eagerly for such liberation. Let us help them change their sexual lives from the compulsive clutching and groping of an ignorant past to the joys of deep erotic caresses which can be theirs in the eternal NOW."

Clarke's use of the word "caresses", I'd say, was a reflection of how he approached the sex act itself. Rushing toward any particularized goal, he insisted, interrupted the sensual flow wherein satisfying sex best thrives.

"Procrastination is the soul of sensuality," he observed. In this age of AIDS, this singular observation seems crucial. While it doesn't deny the deliciousness of sex, it gives us, nevertheless, time to consider both our own welfare and that of our partners.