On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his
landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an
anonymous handwritten letter from a man in Colorado. "Since
learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in
America," the letter began, "I feel I have important information
that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future
book." The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing secret: he had
bought a motel outside Denver to satisfy his voyeuristic desires.
Underneath the roof of his motel, the man had built an "observation
platform," fitted with vents, through which he could watch his
unwitting guests. Unsure what to make of this confession, Talese
traveled to Colorado where he met the man--Gerald Foos--and
verified his story in person. But because Foos insisted on
remaining anonymous, preserving for himself the privacy he denied
his guests, Talese filed his reporting away, assuming the story
would remain untold. Over the ensuing years, Foos occasionally
reached out to Talese to fill him in on the latest developments in
his life. He also sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his
guests and their habits, work that Foos believed made him a
pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. America
in microcosm had passed through the Voyeur's motel, and he
witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the
upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much
more. But Foos continued to insist on anonymity. Now, after
thirty-five years, he's ready to go public and Gay Talese can
finally tell his story. The Voyeur's Motel is an extraordinary work
of narrative journalism, at once a portrait of one complicated man,
and an examination of secret lives and shifting mores in a
culturally-evolving country.
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