Alex Comfort; ‘Joy of Sex’ Author, Novelist and Poet

Alex Comfort, the British physician, poet, novelist, gerontologist and philosopher who wrote more than 50 books but will be forever known as the author of one--the landmark 1972 bestseller “The Joy of Sex”--has died. He was 80.

Comfort died Sunday in an Oxfordshire, England, nursing home where he had been under care for a series of strokes suffered over the last nine years.

A singular personality who was once jailed with Bertrand Russell for organizing an anti-nuclear sit-in at London’s Trafalgar Square, Comfort came to regard “Joy” as something of an albatross that he felt improperly overshadowed the rest of his work.

“The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking” (also subtitled “A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking”), which included breezy, often amusing, text and illustrations of myriad sexual positions, sold 12 million copies worldwide and was translated into two dozen languages. The book was followed by “More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to ‘The Joy of Sex’ ” in 1973.

In 1991, Comfort updated the sex manual to consider the dangers of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases with “The New Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking for the Nineties.” The advent of AIDS, the author cautioned, “totally alters the sexual landscape.” He warned: “If your newly found love won’t use a condom, you are in bed with a witless, irresponsible and uncaring person.”

But in the 1990s as well as the 1970s, readers flocked to libraries and bookstores for instruction, amusement and titillation from Comfort’s descriptions of sex on swings, rocking chairs, railways and horseback. At a time when few spoke publicly or wrote about sex, Comfort’s books put fantasies in print, and made ordinary and extraordinary sex less frightening.

Which was the whole idea.

Comfort originally planned to write “Joy” as a textbook for medical students to replace the stodgy one they were using. “Then I thought . . . I’ll write something to give people a good laugh,” he told the London Guardian in 1996.

“I wanted to emphasize the joy of and not the worry of sex,” he said. “There’s no point in lecturing people on love. They don’t respond. But although you can’t teach people about love, you can make the road clearer for love by getting rid of some of the worries about sex.”

Comfort also wrote a well-received book on aging called “A Good Age,” published in 1975. Among his other books were such nonfiction works as “First Year Physiological Technique” and “Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State” and novels including “The Silver River,” which he wrote when he was a teenager, “The Almond Tree” and “The Powerhouse.” He also wrote books of poetry, including “The Song of Lazarus” and “Haste to the Wedding,” and plays such as “Into Egypt” and “Cities of the Plain.”

The eclectic and prolific writer contributed more than 500 articles to medical and scientific journals and, a dedicated anarchist, even wrote lyrics for folk singer Pete Seeger.

Born in London, Comfort was educated at Cambridge and the University of London. He was a conscientious objector during World War II but spent the years as a doctor in London hospitals. He taught physiology and gerontology at London Hospital Medical College and the University of London.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Comfort lived in California, teaching psychiatry at Stanford University from 1974 to 1983, and working at the UC Neuropsychiatric Institute from 1980 to 1991.

Once asked to describe himself for the reference book Contemporary Authors, the irreverent writer called himself a “medical biologist, writer and pamphleteer, dividing time equally between science, literature and politico-social agitation of various kinds, chiefly connected with anarchism, pacifism, sex law reforms and application of sociological ideas to society generally.”

Comfort’s first marriage, to Ruth Harris, ended in divorce after 30 years, and his second wife, Jane Henderson, died in 1991. He is survived by a son from his first marriage, Nicholas, and three grandchildren.

Asked a few years ago if he expected to remarry, the doctor known to the world as the grand old man of sex mused ruefully that nobody would marry an invalid confined to a “bloody chair.” Reminded that he continued to possess a remarkable brain, he retorted: “Ah, yes, but no one marries a brain.”