GEOFF DYER: Sex scenes are difficult to write partly because the choice of verbs and nouns is so limited. You can mint new verbs — one of Martin Amis’s characters speaks of having “Mailered” a woman — but this tends to take us into the realm of comedy, and sex, if it’s going well, is not comic. Even when it’s going badly, i.e., not going at all, it tends to be embarrassing rather than funny. Because having sex with someone for the first time is a leap into another reality — one moment you’re having drinks, the next you’re doing stuff you have dreamed of since you were 13. It seems to demand a shift into a new register. Except, it seems, if you’re writing about gay male sex. In Alan Hollinghurst’s novels you get these day-to-day scenes, described in meticulous, almost classical prose, and then, without any change of gear, we are in a demotic tangle of body parts.
Writing my first novel in the 1980s, at the height of the feminist terror, when men were obliged to accept that dungarees were a form of lingerie, anything approaching a heterosexual equivalent was unthinkable. There’s a kiss in that book of mine and then, in the style of old movies, we dissolve to black. This was handy but out of keeping with everything else in the book, which was quite explicit: if a character picked up a cup, you could see the coffee in it. So in subsequent novels I decided that if people went into the bedroom, I had to follow and dutifully record whatever went on there. The result? Well, the virtue of pornography is that it makes films like “The Double Life of Véronique” seem vulgarly dishonest by comparison. By these lights the best writing about sex often seems pornographic rather than artful.
Dyer’s most recent novel is “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.”

RACHEL KUSHNER: I don’t think of sex as any more difficult to write about than any other human behavior. Writers fail or soar at anything. Everyone thinks about sex, engages in it. It’s the secret we all share. Just acknowledging its constant presence in people’s thoughts is a good direction for a novelist. Of the books I like, it could be argued that sex is infused into every cadence, even if never explicitly. And “not explicit” doesn’t mean that the prudish kiss leads to the prissy dissolve, but that characters are motored by desire. The authors I admire most seem to render an erotic force field on every page. DeLillo melds nuclear war and Texas college football in “End Zone,” and it’s hot. Rage, too, is about sex (consider Euripides’ Medea). So is despair (“Miss Lonelyhearts”). Then there is plain old unvarnished lust, front and center in many of my favorite works: the poetry of the French troubadours and of Baudelaire, the novels of Genet, the weird louche America of William Gaddis’s “Recognitions.” It’s a nice image that the patchwork quilt at the Spouter Inn matches Queequeg’s patchwork-tattooed arms, but what distinguishes flesh from quilt is touch: a warm weight thrown over Ishmael. Some writer recently claimed somewhere that “Moby-Dick” has no sex in it. I find that idea strange. See what you want, Melville fan who is blind to buddy love. “Buddy” relates to “bunkie,” which means “bedmate,” and that is what Ishmael is to Queequeg, in their very first encounter.
Kushner’s is the author of the novels “The Flamethrowers” and “Telex From Cuba.”