Some history notes on this anti-sex left thread.
Sometime in the early Eighties about the same time as the arrival of AIDS and HIV as a public concern, in the depths of the Reagan administration's early across the board attacks on political liberalism, the entire country went through a cultural shift of some sort. It would be easy enough to claim that change was the effect of the Reagan administration's public policies, but I suspect it had multiple causes of which the various Reagan pronouncements were simply part but not the whole of it.
In any event, part of that cultural shift effected a broad blanket like suppression of all sorts of cultural, sexual and sensual attitudes, styles, and practices. Among the noticeable public aspects of this general rise in Puritanism was a rise in anti-smoking policies and a vast increase in the criminal punishments for drunk driving and minor drug possession. There were also a variety of anti-pornography movements occurring on local levels closing down porn and sex toy shops, porn movie houses, and drug paraphernalia stores.
In this same period, there was a rise in anti-gay and anti-lesbian attacks, attitudes, laws, and various rightwing denouncements. The Christian right was on the rise, empowered by the Reagan administration and given the tacit approval to whip up a kind of moralizing public hysteria. The first of the serious abortion clinic attacks and protests were mounted about this period.
All of these events and much more endlessly rained down on the US public and managed by its sheer unending weight to breakdown a long and difficult to built liberalization and tolerance in generalized terms. You could simply use the rise and fall of the ERA during the period as a crude index of what I am trying to describe.
Somewhere in this horribly destructive battle against the righwing and its insane Puritanism, the whole spectrum of sensual and sexual practices and attitudes were deformed.
I would characterize the prior era say the mid 60s-70s as a liberalization or Europeanization of popular culture in the sense of its expressions of sexuality and sensuality. The reaction of 80s and most of the 90s was some kind of attempt by political and social institutions to re-align the culture itself, re-puritanize it, which essentially deformed it.
So, I would say that whatever effects could be seen as an anti-sex Left are simply a reflection of a much more general sort of destruction and deformation wrought by the Right and its long campaign to re-Puritanize the US. In overt social and legal terms they have more or less won the battle. I would estimate that roughly half of what many people do with each for intimacy, enjoyment and pleasure is illegal. In other words a significant part of human life has been criminalized.
That is the overt battle. Since it is probably impossible to discover what actually goes on and what people actually think and do in these realms, thanks to the massive formal repressions, I just assume most people have gotten used to either lying or remaining silent. Modesty as a public face is essentially political protection.
So yes, it would be nice to celebrate a sex-positive Left, except for the fact most of it is illegal.
We were Talibanized a long time ago and wear our burkas on the inside, thanks to the fanatically vicious rightwing reactionary Christian-crappola we've been oppressed by for last twenty years.
And BTW, Anthony, stop apologizing. It's embarrassing.
Chuck Grimes