A Driving Passion

Marco Vassi died of AIDS on January 14, 1989, at the age of 51. By that time he had written a dozen books and countless articles, and earned a worldwide reputation as the most gifted erotic writer of our era, with his work in translation throughout Europe, as well as in America and England.
"We are all pilgrims," Marco often said. Born Ferdinand Vasquez, young "Freddie" admired the adventurer Marco Polo, and adopted his first name. He was, indeed, the quintessential pilgrim/adventurer, exploring the furthest realms of sexuality and using these explorations as the basis of his fiction and short essays. For Marco was born into a strict Roman Catholic Italian family in East Harlem, New York which at the time was an insular Italian-American neighborhood, rife with sexual taboos and limitations, where missionary-style intercourse was allowable only after marriage. It was a personal rebellion against these sexual restrictions that launched his sojourn into the world of eroticism, which, in turn, brought him his literary reputation, and, ultimately, caused his death.
In 1975, 14 years before he died, Marco gave a series of lectures in which he shared his personal experiences and sexual philosophy with an attentive audience. This is the substance of A Driving Passion. Ribald, witty, and frank - as was his style - most of the personal anecdotes he recalls occurred in the late 1950's, a time before the social and sexual revolution of the sixties. It affords a good glimpse into the early explorations of the man who Norman Mailer honored by saying he had "the highest opinion not only of his work but his intellectual boldness."