In 1983, Berkeley poet and journalist Mark O’Brien wrote an article about sexual surrogates — women and men trained to help people with disabilities learn to use their bodies to give themselves and others erotic pleasure.
For O’Brien, the subject wasn’t academic. After a bout of childhood polio, he had spent much of his life in an iron lung. He could talk, and tap out words on a typewriter holding a stick in his mouth. He could feel things below the neck. But he couldn’t move his muscles.
In an article published in 1990, O’Brien admitted he was jealous of the people he’d interviewed in 1983 — it turns out he was, at the time, a virgin. The second piece was called, “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” and it’s the basis for the movie The Sessions.
Two things sneaked past my defenses against what I snarkily call the disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait picture. The first is that Mark, played by John Hawkes, is almost never seen at anything but a 90-degree angle, sometimes in his iron lung, sometimes on a rolling stretcher — never sitting up. That sidelong vantage creates a kind of distance and keeps the pathos from being in your face. The second is, he’s so funny.