He had neatly trimmed dark hair, and, behind horn-rimmed glasses, he projected a friendly expression befitting an innkeeper.Īfter we had exchanged courtesies, I accepted his invitation to be a guest at his motel for a few days. He wore a tan jacket and an open-collared dress shirt that seemed a size small for his heavily muscled neck. In his mid-forties, Foos was hazel-eyed, around six feet tall, and slightly overweight. My first impression was that this amiable stranger resembled many of the men I had flown with from Phoenix. “Welcome to Denver,” he said, waving in his left hand the note I had mailed him.
Two weeks later, when I approached the luggage carrousel, I spotted a man holding out his hand and smiling. He left a message on my answering machine a few days later, saying that he would meet me at the airport baggage claim. Since I was planning to be in Phoenix later in the month, I decided to send him a note, with my phone number, proposing that we meet during a stopover in Denver. Also, the opening line of my 1969 book about the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” was: “Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places.”Īs to whether my correspondent in Colorado was, in his own words, “a deranged voyeur”-a version of Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, or the murderous filmmaker in Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom”-or instead a harmless, if odd, man of “unlimited curiosity,” or even a simple fabulist, I could know only if I accepted his invitation. Could such a man be a reliable source? Still, as I reread the letter, I reflected that his “research” methods and motives bore some similarity to my own in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” I had, for example, kept notes while managing massage parlors in New York and while mingling with swingers at the Sandstone nudist commune in Southern California (one key difference: the people I observed and reported on had given me their consent).
And I was deeply unsettled by the way he had violated his customers’ trust and invaded their privacy. As a nonfiction writer who insists on using real names in articles and books, I knew that I could not accept his condition of anonymity. Presently I cannot reveal my identity because of my business interests, but will be revealed when you can assure me that this information would be held in complete confidence.Īfter reading this letter, I put it aside for a few days, undecided on whether to respond. My main objective in wanting to provide you with this confidential information is the belief that it could be valuable to people in general and sex researchers in particular. Sexually, I have witnessed, observed and studied the best first hand, unrehearsed, non-laboratory sex between couples, and most other conceivable sex deviations during these past 15 years. I have seen most human emotions in all their humor and tragedy carried to completion. The Seventies, later part, brought another sexual deviation forward, namely, group sex, which I took great interest in watching . . . Homosexuality, of which I had little interest, but still watched to determine motivation and procedure. Lesbianism, of which I made a particular study. . . . Wives who cheat on their husbands and visa versa.
Couples who aren’t married, but live together. Married couples traveling from state to state, either on business or vacation. The businessman who takes his secretary to a motel during the noon hour, which is generally classified as “hot sheet” trade in the motel business. These individuals were from every walk of life. And compiled interesting statistics on each, i.e., what was done what was said their individual characteristics age & body type part of the country from where they came and their sexual behavior.