Larry Flynt to Pen a ‘People’s History’ of Presidential Sex

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—Hustler founder Larry Flynt has always been interested in the sex lives of famous people, especially hypocritical famous people. Now he is parlaying that interest into an actual history of the sex lives of America’s first families, titled, One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents and First Ladies Shaped America, due in 2011 from Palgrave Macmillan.

Flynt will co-author the book with Columbia University lecturer David Eisenbach, the author of Gay Power: An American Revolution and co-author with Mike Gravel of The Kingmakers: How the Media Threatens Our Security and Our Democracy.

Gawker got the real scoop, though, when a tipster forwarded them Flynt’s 54-page book proposal for the history.

“During the Monica Lewinski scandal,” he writes, “I started exposing the sexual peccadilloes of hypocritical politicians who said one thing and did another. Recently, I began wondering, if today’s politicians can’t keep their libidos in check, what about the great heroes of American history? So I did some research and discovered that our past leaders were just as sexually wild and, more importantly, that their crazy sex lives actually had a huge impact on American history. Far from being a purely private matter, the sexual activities of America’s great leaders affected pivotal events that altered the lives of millions. Since no one has ever written a book that makes this point, I decided to undertake this effort.”

The proposal envisions seven chapters not counting an introduction and conclusion:

Chapter 1: Our Founding Flirts or Fornicators

Chapter 2: Sex and the Civil War

Chapter 3: Affairs of State

Chapter 4: The Swinging Roosevelts

Chapter 5: America’s Sex Czar

Chapter 6: The Nude Frontier

Chapter 7: Thank God for Monica!

Intended to be “salacious and fun as well as serious and iconoclastic,” the book, says Flynt, will be in the vein of revelatory books such as James Loewen’s Lies My Father Told Me and Lies Across America, and academically sourced along the lines of the late Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Kenneth C. Davis’ Don’t Know Much About History.

The book proposal is available here.