Worldly wisdom: Brad Gooch wrote his way through the sex-drenched '70s and AIDS-plagued '80s. These days he's proving that gay sexuality can be spiritual. (Books).

There's nothing new about gay men searching for godlike boyfriends. But how former model Brad Gooch came to be counseling them with books like Dating the Greek Gods (just out from Simon & Schuster, $21)--that's a longer story.

Gooch channeled his inside view of sex-saturated gay Manhattan in the '70s and '80s with novels like Scary Kisses and The Golden Age of Promiscuity (and turned out a major biography of gay poet Frank O'Hara, City Poet). How does a man get from Promiscuity to Greek Gods and its predecessor, Finding the Boyfriend Within? It's not a midlife arc from sex to love, Gooch says: "It's more like trying to figure out the connection between sex and love and the rest of our life."

His quest for balance dates back to his coming of age in the 1970s. "For gay men, sex was like a political act," he says. "Then, between the movement's coming of age and my coming of age"--he says, laughing--"and AIDS and all these things we went through, a lot of us were faced with the issue of, How does the sexual liberation aspect fit into the other parts of your life?"

Gooch viewed the onset of gay middle age as a spiritual fiddle. "The '70s mode of behavior was a great Dionysian phase," he says, "but then, in the language of Dating the Greek Gods, how do you integrate that with an Apollonian longing also--to have some kind of wisdom and connection with other people that's both friendship and love?"

He found a model in the Greek ideal of balance as opposed to morality. "Socrates' statement 'Know yourself is the first step toward a metamorphosis in your social life," he says. "That includes dating, love, and friendship. The more in tune we are with our inner selves, the more alert we are to the signals being sent by others. Dating the Greek Gods is an attempt to make that connection more clear."

Pela is author of Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters.