VH1's pale imitation of the Sexual Revolution

This is compelling television to be sure -- after all, we're talking about sex: hippies cavorting in the altogether. Women's libbers brandishing their bras. Playboy bunnies and Hugh Hefner. Helen Gurley Brown and Burt Reynolds's naked centrefold. Suburban swingers. Jaybird-naked couples shedding what remains of their inhibitions at the infamous Plato's Retreat. Drag queens and porn stars. But there's something missing from this made-in-America tableau: Almost every single one of the characters in the spotlight is white, notes Teresa Witz.

Such is the case with VH1's new, four-part documentary series: Sex: The Revolution, which starts tomorrow night. "Sex" presents a sweeping survey of the seismic changes in 20th-century American sexual mores, and the legal and cultural shifts that resulted from it. A large part of the problem is that it tries to do too much, tossing out historical highlights and lowlights at breathtaking speed. The talking heads who shape the discourse over four hours -- Erica Jong, Armistead Maupin, Hefner and Gloria Steinem -- tend to be the usual suspects, while black and brown folks get shoved to the background. They're the soundtrack through which white folks found sexual salvation. (Cue the Little Richard music. See the stoned sister falling out of her dress at Studio 54.)

"It's true," says Hart Perry, who directed the series along with Richard Lowe. "At one point, we were dealing with the cultural crossover between black and white . . . when we talk about rock-and-roll. I wanted to talk about Norman Mailer, the 'White Negro.' . . . [But] there was too much competition for stories. This is certainly not the definitive story on the sexual revolution."

It is a story of the sexual revolution, shown through "the artifacts of culture," news footage, films, music videos, photographs, with a chorus of white boomers commenting on the action, and reminiscing about times gone by. Melvin Van Peebles, black feminist Michele Wallace, Danny Glover and musician Nile Rodgers make brief appearances; no Latinos or Asians are interviewed. (Glover on San Francisco's "Summer of Love": "It was about taking mescaline and getting laid. Or smoking weed and getting laid.")

Question: How can you talk about the cultural icons of the sexual revolution and not discuss blaxploitation diva Pam Grier? Or extol the significance of a loincloth-clad Jo Raquel Tejada, a.k.a. Raquel Welch, in "One Million Years B.C."? Why is it that instead we are told that the poster girl for the female orgasm was Jane Fonda in "Barbarella"? Or Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow soap model gone bad in "Behind the Green Door"?

In days gone by -- many days gone by -- we as a nation were a buttoned-up lot, having sex but never copping to it, repressed and reactionary. Good girls didn't do it, not unless they'd signed on the dotted line, crossing the great divide between Mrs. and Miss. Good boys never did it with other boys. The bad boys who did were thrown in jail, diagnosed as sick and probed with electrodes in an effort to "cure" them. Throughout much of the country, interracial marriage was illegal, as was birth control -- even for married couples in Connecticut. Fear ruled. You fornicated at your peril. But after Alfred Kinsey, the '60s, the Pill, Stonewall and Roe v. Wade, something changed: Now people were doing it and talking about it.

So where's the full conversation in "Sex: The Revolution"? Perry says he wanted to explore the legacy of lynching victim Emmett Till and the lethal fear of black male sexuality. But largely missing also is the inclusion of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., as participants in the process. Watching the first segment, we see sex anthropologist Kinsey in the late 1940s and early '50s loosening up America with his books, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" and "Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female," and we see black-and-white films featuring terrified white kids scared to even kiss. Then the footage cuts to Little Richard jamming with his guitar, and suddenly the (white) kids are rocking and rolling and going nuts. The message: Black sexuality is alien and different from "mainstream" society, contagious and powerful enough to make everyone else abandon all constraints.

When white feminists are talking about being pushed to the sidelines of the antiwar movement by macho males, the segment cries out for a little perspective. Like hearing how Black Power pioneers Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown felt when Stokely Carmichael declared that the only position for a woman in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was "prone."

It's cool that the filmmakers explore the beginnings of the gay and lesbian pride movement, and how the Stonewall uprising of '69 was the watershed moment in the movement. But it would've been nice if the directors had acknowledged that it was black and Puerto Rican drag queens such as the late Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who got things started back when the cops showed up at the Stonewall Inn.

Sex: The Revolution airs on VH1 at 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Uncensored encore showings will be on the Sundance Channel on May 19 and 20 at 12 a.m.