Barbara Lowry Sobotka 1951-2023 Barbara Lowry Sobotka passed away peacefully, Monday, Sept. 11. Barb was born in Buffalo, New York, Aug. 12, 1951. In her early childhood the Lowry family relocated to Salem, the hometown of her father, where Barb attended St. Paul School and graduated from Salem High School in 1969. Barb then attended […]
The pioneering Observer journalist, columnist and agony aunt is remembered by her devoted personal assistant for her kindness, intelligence and sense of fun
Last modified on Tue 15 Dec 2020 13.52 EST
‘Sex in the 90s’ was the cover tease for the
Observer Magazine of 29 November 1987, when Suzanne Lowry’s short story synthesised some of the contemporary fears about Aids. It was ‘a fantasy about the meritocratic middle classes… a cautionary tale to show what could happen to them, caught between the old selfish libertarianism and the new hypocritical conformism’.
Reflecting that ‘the time between the introduction of the pill and the emergence of Aids was an interval of strange hubris, the only period of history in which people believed that sex was a wonderful “safe” recreation,’ Lowry foresaw a ‘growing return to a more “normal” perception of sex as being dangerous as well as ecstatic’.