Surrogate sex partner inspires story and film

Longtime Berkeley sex surrogate's work with poet inspires film

In 38 years as a surrogate partner - a profession formerly known as a sex surrogate - Cheryl Cohen Greene has helped all kinds of clients. She's worked with couples, with married men and single men, with disabled people, with men in their 60s, 70s and 80s who have never had sex.

One of her clients, the poet and journalist Mark O'Brien, was stricken with polio at 6 and spent most of his life in an iron lung. In 1986, when O'Brien was 36 and a virgin, he hired Cohen Greene as his surrogate partner. They met six times and remained friends until O'Brien's death in 1999.

Their story is now an independent film, "The Surrogate," which premiered Jan. 23, 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival. Starring John Hawkes ("Winter's Bone") as O'Brien and Helen Hunt ("As Good as It Gets") as Cohen Greene, it's adapted from a 1990 article, "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate," that O'Brien wrote for the Sun magazine of North Carolina.

SOURCE: Edward Guthmann; The Chronicle/SFGate

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