When English-born Grant Stoddard planted his feet on American soil in the pursuit of true love, he had no idea the course his life would take. Stoddard eventually landed a gig as a go-to-guy sex columnist and recently published his first book, Working Stiff: the Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert.

It all began with a sudden whim, as he explained to the Gay & Lesbian Times.

“I met a girl at university [in England]. We were just platonic, friends, but I realized I really liked her – only after she’d gone back to New Jersey,” Stoddard said. “Then I did something kind of foolish, turning up in New Jersey practically unannounced. We just said, ‘How ’bout it?’ And luckily, she had a lapse of judgment and said, ‘OK.’”

When that relationship dissolved, Stoddard found himself a stranger in a strange land on the verge of being deported.

“I was actually homeless, essentially, and living in the East Village. I was about to be deported,” Stoddard said.

Little did Stoddard know that by entering an X-rated online trivia contest ‘with a twist,’ that ultimately that twist would prove to be one of fate.

“I won a competition and the prize was to have sex with this writer, Lisa Carver, who wrote a column about her sex life called “The Lisa Diaries” for Nerve.com. She’d been writing it for some years and she had recently just gotten married,” Stoddard explained. “And as a consequence, her column had gotten rather uneventful, so she decided to do something to spice it up. One of the things she did was to stage a trivia competition in a chat room that she hosted. The prize was to go to New Hampshire and have sex with her. The whole reason for this was so she’d have some new, fun material to write about.

“I was very inexperienced in the ways of sex, and I found myself at this woman’s house and it turned into this big orgy situation,” he continued. “The next day, after I told her my big sob story, she suggested I apply to Nerve.com because they had an intern position.”

And the tip paid off. Stoddard become an intern at Nerve.com, which eventually led to him writing a regular column for its Web site.

“I was there for about six months, earning $5 an hour, and one of the editors said: ‘Hey! Are you the guy that Lisa wrote about who won the competition? He was from England and his name was Grant.’ And I said I was that guy. She asked, ‘Well, would you do anything?’ And I said, ‘Well, if there’s money in it, probably I will,’” Stoddard said. “Regardless of me having no experience in writing, she asked me to write the column. Then somebody else came up with the idea of putting it into a science format, and that kind of gave me an alibi, like I didn’t really want to do these things, but I was doing them in the name of science.”

And his do-anything-on-a-dare became the basis for his column, “I Did it for Science,” which has literally put Stoddard into unusual positions in the name of “science.”

“I suppose the craziest thing [I did] was a fetish called ‘sploshing,’ which is where you throw food on somebody or have food thrown on you for sexual gratification. I heard about this gentleman that liked that, so me and this other guy went to his house under the auspices of throwing food on him and him getting off on it and me writing about the experience,” Stoddard said. “But in reality, that was [only] a component of it; he did want food thrown on him. He also wanted his house broken into and him beaten up inside it. Then he wanted to be roughed-up, kind of sexually violated, and then get food thrown on him, which was kind of a far cry from the original concept. I wasn’t expecting that experience. I thought we were just going to go up to someone’s house and throw pudding at him, but it turned out to be a lot more hardcore than that.”

When asked if there is anything he wouldn’t do, Stoddard replied: “There’s only been one thing so far. I was actually stranded in the Central Valley, ostensibly doing some writing for about three or four months, and I was going stir crazy. I didn’t want the column to end, but there’s a lack of stuff to be doing when you are all on your own and the nearest metropolis is Fresno, and it’s an hour away. I was kind of out in the boonies – I was actually living on a cattle ranch. My editor asked if I would entertain the idea of going down and trying to fuck one of the cows. And it was there that I drew the line.”

Stoddard’s column became the basis for his book, Working Stiff: the Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert.

“I found it extremely difficult – I was kind of sexually invisible growing up. I think that gave me a fair quotient of self-loathing, especially seeing myself in a sexual way. I’d been like the least likely person to ever have sex ever in my high school. So it was a surreal experience writing about it for the edification for others.”

The experience of having his first book published has had some pros and cons, he said.

“I suppose in my mind when people say ‘book launch’ I’ve imagined a rocket taking off. But it’s really more drawn out, like it happens by inches almost. It’s more of a trickle,” Stoddard explained. “It’s certainly been thrilling to see it in the bookstores like Barnes & Noble and all of that. It seems very surreal, especially when I get MySpace messages from people in the middle of the country saying, ‘I just picked up a copy of your book in Butte, Mont.,’ or something. It blows my mind to think it’s available in places like that, and only then, when I think of it in those terms, do I realize that I’ve been extremely lucky.”

Stoddard is lucky indeed, as the film rights for Working Stiff have been picked up by Paramount Vantage, which means that Stoddard’s sexploits could be coming soon to a theater near you.