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ANNE KENNEY: I'm Anne Kenney. I'm the Carl A. Kroch university librarian and I want to welcome you to the opening event of the Human Sexuality Collection's 25th anniversary.
[APPLAUSE]
I think you're going to like the rest of my introduction as well.
[LAUGHTER]
Some of us grew up and attended college in an era of sexual repression. Fewer of you than I thought, but some of you were.
[LAUGHTER]
It was a time when women had curfews and the three feet on the floor rule applied to visiting the dorm rooms of members of the opposite sex. In 1960, the year the pill was approved for contraceptive use, Cornell conducted what I think was their very first survey of sexual attitudes and behavior among undergraduates. This will probably surprise you, but the entire sample of women surveyed reported that they were virgins.
[LAUGHTER]
Noting that the Gannett Health Center had no official policy toward the dispensation of birth control information and devices, the student government proposed a series of lectures and films on the topic, and also made note of the fact that students at the University of Michigan could, quote, "Volunteer to act as test cases for various birth control devices."
Fast forward another 25 years. And while the sexual revolution was mainstream, the AIDS epidemic spread quickly, infecting one million Americans by 1985 and shaping a whole generation's attitude about sex. Back then, there were few places in the Academy who were documenting sexuality in any kind of comprehensive way. There was the Kinsey Institute Library at Indiana University, which focused on biology and clinical studies, and there was the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, which collected material on women's health and sexuality. But here in upstate New York, our library was making big progress.
These were heady days thinking about our brand new endeavor, its scope, and the parameters. We wanted to define sexuality in the very broadest of terms and figure out how we could make this collection truly useful, not only for research, but also for educational purposes. It felt risky right at the edge of what conservative traditional academics considered scholarship at the time.
And there was resistance from the other side, too. Many lesbians and gay men didn't trust the establishment and its formal institutions. They were excluded by libraries and universities in the past, so they'd taken charge by creating their own organizations run by community volunteers such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City.
Crossing over that threshold and coming into the Academy was a very big deal. Cornell took up the challenge with great enthusiasm. The faculty were absolutely key in supporting the founding of the Human Sexuality Collection, and they played a decisive role in defining and defending the broad range of materials that would be included.
I was honored to serve on the search committee that brought Brenda Marsden to Cornell. We met through the Society of American Archivists and had served on a panel together on documenting lesbian and gay history. She'd always impressed me, so it was great to see her application in the pool.
For her part, Brenda remembers sitting in a park in Madison, Wisconsin and opening the SAA newsletter-- Society of American Archivists newsletter-- to a job announcement for this position. She was finishing her master's degree at the time, and she said it felt like being hit by a bolt of lightning. The luckiest lightning is the image she describes. Perhaps it's no surprise she included an image in the exhibition that shows a love-struck Parisian woman felled by a bolt of lightning. You'll have to go see it for yourself.
For the past 25 years, Brenda has made the Human Sexuality Collection her life's work, and we couldn't imagine a better curator for that collection. She's so dedicated and so passionate about this field, yet she is a gentle steward of the material she collects. She thinks of herself more as a midwife than as a curator. Instead of dictating the collection's direction, she guides it and cares for it, and then releases it to researchers who will use it to create new knowledge and scholarship, and also enhance the knowledge and use of it by students.
Brenda also takes the Human Sexuality Collection to students herself. Two years ago when she was teaching in one of Dagmawi Woubshet's classes, she was showing posters and other materials from AIDS activists. One of the students asked why everyone looked so angry. This student couldn't understand what people were so upset about because in her lifetime, everyone got AIDS education in school and knew there were effective treatments to manage its effects.
She wasn't alive in the 1980s when AIDS was devastating gay communities. It was a mystery disease that people wanted to ignore, and our President Ronald Reagan refused to even say the word AIDS. Primary sources such as those assembled in this collection bring this history to those whose filters have been shaped by the present.
Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president, understood the value of collecting primary source materials from his own time-- things like photographs, and scrapbooks, and pamphlets from the Civil War, abolition, and more. These subjects were deemed worthy of classical education. But he knew these primary sources were vital to a Cornell education and critical to understanding history.
The library continues this legacy, working on the edge and archiving unconventional modern day collections. We do it not only in human sexuality, but also with our hip hop and punk collections, and by adding modern items to more traditional collections such as the witchcraft collection we've just recently been ordered, including more movie posters dealing with vampires and the like.
If some skeptics don't see the value in folk novels about lesbian space aliens and spray paint cans that kids in the Bronx used to do graffiti on subways, well, we believe they will join the skeptics the question and [INAUDIBLE] collecting choices, but later claimed them as their own. Without concerted effort, our view of the past will keep settling on a familiar, comfortable scene.
As curator of the Human Sexuality Collection, Brenda keeps wresting the camera away from the center to capture pictures of sexuality that aren't normally on our TV screens or billboards. Even in a field like this, it is easy and tempting to start collecting happy, pretty stories. But she's made sure that we continue to not ignore the stories of queer people living in poverty and to turn the focus on the diversity of our culture.
Now it's my great pleasure to introduce our panelists for tonight. We're so excited, Susie, that you are back to Cornell. Susie Bright is the country's preeminent feminist sex writer, and she's written six bestselling books. She last visit us about a year ago to give us the Sexual State of The Union talk when she donated her own personal archives to the library.
Susie is a founding editor of On Our Backs, the groundbreaking 1990s lesbian sex magazine, and she's a renowned author, editor and podcaster. Susie is a wonderful friend to our library, and we're so glad she's returned to celebrate this anniversary with us.
We're also pleased to welcome Urvashi Vaid to Cornell. Her leadership in the LGBT movement spans more than 30 years. She served as the staff attorney for ACLU's National Prison Project and the Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She was the executive director there when the task force decided to place their records here at Cornell. And I'd like to thank you for your pivotal role in that.
Currently, she is the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. She's written extensively on lesbian and gay politics, class inequality, and she's working on a new book about how sexual and gender justice movements can engage tradition-based resistance. I first came to know her work through her thoughtful op-ed pieces in Out Magazine nearly 20 years ago, and I'm delighted to welcome you here to Cornell.
Director and producer David France is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author who has been writing about AIDS since 1982, beginning in gay community papers. Today, he is one of the best known chroniclers of the epidemic, writing in the New York Times, Newsweek, and New York Magazine where he is now a contributing editor.
He is currently at work on A Major History of AIDS which will be published in 2015, just in time for Cornell sesquicentennial. As a documentary filmmaker, he directed the Oscar nominated How to Survive a Plague, and he did some of the research for that film with materials from our very own collections here at Cornell.
And Dag Woubshet will be moderating tonight's panel. He's an Associate Professor of English here at Cornell, and he's the author of a forthcoming book, The Calendar of Loss Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS, and co-editor of Ethiopia-- Literature, Art, and Culture, a Special Issue of Callaloo.
In 2010, he was named a young global leader by the World Economic Forum. And his other honors include a faculty fellowship at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University in 2010 and '11, and the Robert A. & Donna B Paul Award for Excellence in Advising in 2012. Last fall, he was named one of the 10 best professors at Cornell by Business Insider.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
A peripatetic scholar who divides his time among Ithaca, New York City, and Addis Ababa. Please join me in welcoming our wonderful panelists.
[APPLAUSE]
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Thank you, Anne, for that great introduction. I've been told to speak very closely into the mic. And if I get distracted by the thing that's a phallic thing jutting out, just bring me back to the conversation.
I'm really thrilled to moderate this discussion with these extraordinary people. And before we start, I thought I want the audience to help me set the tone of the conversation. Collectively, we're going to thank Brenda Marsden and her colleagues at the Human Sexuality Collection for organizing such a fantastic exhibition and the set of events around the show like this one.
So instead of just clapping, we're going to shout, or moan, groan, scream. Let out whatever pleasure sound or silence that leaps to mind. That's how we're going to pay our gratitude, OK? So now, on three, two, come with it, one.
[WHOOPING]
Ooh. Ow. [LAUGHS] Excellent. Excellent.
[APPLAUSE]
All right. So I want to begin by asking you all a very simple question that is, why is it important to have an exhibition that foregrounds the subject of sex and sexual dissidents?
SUSIE BRIGHT: You know, I often wonder why every exhibit doesn't have sex at the foreground. The only reason it doesn't is because of the shame, and secrecy, and control over sexuality. How many of us have had perhaps someone in your family or someone you cared about, and after they had passed, everyone said, well, we wanted to know more about them, but everything was destroyed? And you start to wonder about these mystery characters. And if you've ever had that in your own family, well, just imagine human history at large.
So often, an explanation for why something happened the way it did was because of a sexual path and sexual decisions. I mean, it's just like breathing. Why is it ever excluded? I suppose sometimes people say, well, if you did a good job, Susie, you'd put yourself out of business. And you know, I agree, and I would applaud it. And if we had a much more enlightened view of integrated history, perhaps we would look at this archive with different eyes, too.
URVASHI VAID: I think that I agree with you. And I think the control of sex, the conversation about it, the performance of it, the consequences of it, or the imagined consequences of talking and doing it, the control of all of that is such a source. I mean, it is the source of repression for women, for men, for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. For all people.
And I think the kind of control and relegation of sex to a private, shame ridden, secret, we don't talk about it sphere was one of the things that the feminist movement tried to undo by bringing things out into the open. It's one of the things that the LGBT movement, when it was called the gay liberation movement, tried to do before it became the marriage movement tried to do. I mean, we went from sexual outlaws to the married couple next door. That's an interesting progression.
But I think that sex is so important to each of us. That's why I think it's important to talk about sex and to have shows about it. We talk about it with each other, I think. At least I do [LAUGHS] with my friends and buddies. And we obsess about it, we worry about it, we think about our performance, we rank it, we talk about other people's sex lives. But it's still like a dirty little secret.
DAVID FRANCE: It still is. You're right. You know what this exhibit made me realize and think about was how powerful movements are. And you see in the course of this exhibit and the years covered in the exhibit how the impact of activism, the impact of social justice movements made a huge difference over time.
In the few years that are covered in the exhibit-- 100 and some-odd years-- you can see it's really is, as you were saying, Susie, the history. It's human history expressed through this little window, and such a powerful window. And you see in each one of those advances the role of individuals in claiming the claimable, naming the unnamable, and making it part of something fresh, something accessible, something affirming.
I also remembered that when I started college, in the college library, I looked up homosexuality in the card catalog and it didn't exist. It referred me instead to sexuality, comma, deviance. And that's where the conversation was then, those few years ago. And I can see it in this joyous way through this exhibit and through this conversation that's being kind of brought together over such a small period of human history how people have made that difference, and how making that difference impacts that idea of identity and affirmation. And for that reason, I think it's tremendously powerful and essential to have sex in the institution.
If I could follow up that question and ask, I think about contemporary American culture. I can't help but notice the contradictory way, even a hypocritical way of representing sex. It seems it's everywhere and nowhere at once. We find it readily in our movies, TV shows, music videos, political scandals. At the same time, rarely do we find an honest, vulnerable discussion of sex on the public stage. And I wonder if you see that, or how you might explain these competing attitudes, if you will, of exposure and cover-up of sex at the same time.
URVASHI VAID: You know, I think that the mainstream culture reflects the kind of contradictory way people still feel about sex. The idea of sex as a positive thing is still rejected by many religious institutions, by many societies, including this one. I mean, yeah. I'm losing my train of thought. I have so many things I want to say about it.
But I think that I was trying to think of an example of how sexual freedom is not really talked about in the public sphere. And I think the best example I can give is the LGBT movement, and its own discussions about sexuality, and how muted they have become.
When I came up in the '70s, I was in college in the '70s. The conversation, we talked about how sex was depicted in the public eye. We protested it. We went to protests and pickets about the movie, about movies like Windows and Cruising. We talked about the denigration of women. But we also talked about the affirmation of sexuality and of pleasure as a positive thing.
When I think about the argument in courts today in the marriage cases, we're still arguing about sex is for procreation. They're still arguing that the only legitimate role for marriage is to have procreative sex. I mean, we haven't really come that far in 30 or 40 years if major institutions, if serious people are standing up in courtrooms across this country and saying that marriage is for procreation and the containment of sex.
SUSIE BRIGHT: That's one of the things that this exhibit shows so well, is how public policy in the law is like the last shoe to drop. If you can look back a century and more and see examples of sexuality used to titillate, to sell something, to encourage someone, even if it's silly, even if you laugh at the commodification and say, oh, they want you to buy this because then you will be desirable. But after you buy that, you're going to have to buy one more thing.
And there's so many pieces in the exhibit that show the history of the advice manual how-to. I want to have sex, or even, how you must stop masturbating. I mean, that book it's this thick and about seven-point type about why you must stop masturbating. But lots of advice that is supposed to lead to happiness, either because you abstained or because you finally figured out a trick or two, there's that. There's the titillating material, whether it's movie posters or those naughty postcards. I mean, you have that.
And then you have the protest and civil rights examples, all of which I think that our movement-- women's lib, and gay lib, all that '60s and '70s counterculture was when notions of creating a sexuality that showed vulnerability, and intimacy, and wasn't about selling you anything in particular except an encouragement to be honest and to be authentic.
I think some of my favorite parts of the collection are pieces from Honey Lee Cottrell. I'm going to make you guys raise your hands. Just raise your hand, Honey Lee. You'll see a lot of her work. She was the first staff photographer of the first women's erotic magazine about anything, ever, On Our Backs.
Our first art director, Lulu Belliveau. Lulu, you have to raise your hand. When you walk into the exhibit, you'll see these. One woman who's wrapped in caution tape and a bunch of other women who are all in a circle kissing. Photo taken by Jessica, who is here. She has just arrived. We've all come in from a million places. You missed us earlier today, but we pinned Lulu down and said, you were there when these photos were taken.
And we're setting up the models and the art direction. What was that all about? So to look back on that, people say, why did you do it? And for me, it was such a temper tantrum at the time. Like, I was so tired of people thinking that we were sexless just blank cards with some kind of political agenda that didn't have anything to do with sexuality and humanity. It was great to turn that upside down.
DAVID FRANCE: I was thinking as you were talking about that there must be something to say about the cyclical nature of the way we talk about sex, and how we have these moments in the 1880s, 1890s, the '20s, the '40s around the war, the '60s, and '70s. And there's got to be somebody who can say something smart about that. I can't, unfortunately.
[LAUGHTER]
But what I realized as I was thinking about that. We've been in decline, I think, in our discussion about sexuality since AIDS, and we've never really reclaimed that. We've never recovered from that. And sex took a near-fatal blow in the early '80s. And it was held responsible for so much, and it was blamed, and the people engaged in it were blamed, and the discussion of it was blamed.
And it's really so much about the way outlaws became in-laws, as you were saying, is sad. But it comes from there. It comes from that idea that we've taken to heart too much, I think, this idea that sex has terrible consequences. And so if you look at those cycles every 20 years or so, we're well beyond that now, and there's no movement to bring that back that I've seen, anyway.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Until tonight.
DAVID FRANCE: Until now.
[LAUGHTER]
So doors closed, we're going to do this.
SUSIE BRIGHT: But you know, David, it's interesting when you talk about that. Because in some ways, though, the AIDS epidemic in the '80s brought forth a conversation about sex that hadn't happened in news media, for sure. Because I'll never forget sitting somewhere and seeing Ted Koppel or somebody talking about anal sex on ABC News, and transmission, and being very explicit, and there being graphics and stuff behind him.
And they had to start talking about, or we pushed it. The movement pushed the media to start talking about transmission and the mechanics of it because it was about saving lives. You had to get the information out.
And there was a big fight for Surgeon General Koop to even release a semi-explicit pamphlet about AIDS in the early '80s. '84, '85, I think it came out, or '86, the Surgeon General's first thing on AIDS. It was five years after the epidemic had been raging in the gay community. It took--
DAVID FRANCE: And what that did was re-medicalize the conversation about sex and homosexuality. And you can't have erotic and medical. It really doesn't work. Although, there's probably a website. I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
URVASHI VAID: You know what? There's probably a kink about erotic and medical.
DAVID FRANCE: And there have been some efforts culturally to claim sex. Because gay men were involved in such traumatic battles for survival in the '80s, women, lesbians especially, kind of took up the cudgel of sexuality for a period of time. But as far as driving culture the way say the '60s and '70s drove culture, we haven't gotten anywhere near that.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: I thought I'll follow that up maybe by asking you all individual questions. Susie, when I think about your work, the phrase that comes to mind, along with sex radical and sex positive, is self ownership. And I think about the variety of forums. As you just mentioned, On Our Backs, the first women's sex magazine, starting the best American erotica series, your weekly program to which I subscribe and I think you all should, In Bed with Susie Bright. I have picked up a lot of tips. I have made many a man happy.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, all this to say that you have opened up such a necessary space and have engendered a vocabulary for us for us to take our sexual identities seriously, the fact that we're sexual beings. So I wonder if you could just comment on this imperative, a kind of abiding principle in your work that we broach publicly our deepest and most private fantasies and fetishes.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Well, some people have said to me, well, if it was up to you, Susie, do you just want everyone to march around in the nude just babbling incoherently about things we'd rather not be inundated with? Is that your idea of a utopia? Because I'm getting earplugs. You know, like enough is enough.
And there is no danger of privacy, and ambivalence, and daydream, and imagination. And none of that is going to leave the human mind and heart ever. As much as I learn about myself and have compassion and insight into other people's sexuality, as much as I understand that sex doesn't lie.
And if you can figure out people's sexual motives, it's very much like follow the money. I mean, every time I am bedeviled by something that's happening in the world, I follow the money and I follow the sex, and it always takes me to the end of the line. It's that onion, and you keep going.
When I was looking at the Archives as I began sending my boxes to Cornell, and packing things, and, oh, so, whew. Just took a lot out seeing who was gone. It was like a memorial. It was grieving. It felt so good to know that they were going to some place where the public could really look through this because I've been here before.
And when Brenda took me into what she nicknames The Vault with all the existing rare manuscripts and collections, I just wanted them to lock me in and put little bread and water through a slot. You know, like yes, this is where, if we don't have this kind of documentation, no one really knows what happens. Because you have to have multiple people talking about the same events and the same images to find out what really happened because my memory and your memory of that night is going to be different. And no one can really tell history well if we don't have verification and comparisons.
This time looking at it, I thought about secrets I had back then that I didn't talk about. Everyone thought we were so brazen hussies doing this magazine, or that I was some kind of nut going to review porn films and theaters all by myself with a little notebook. But now I look back, and I look at those pictures of those women, and what we said, and we had other secrets.
We were very diverse in our backgrounds. Some of it you could see by the color of the people in the magazine. Other times, it was because so many of us were working class, or we were working as whores or sex workers to fund our first college education, or to be the first person in the family.
On Our Backs wouldn't have been funded if it wasn't for-- I mean, our first issue, it was so expensive. This is before digital anything. If it hadn't been for the receipts of prostitution and stripping, the first issue would not have come out. But we thought everyone was so against us, the last thing we could do was just add another thing for them to have to digest. And so better to just kind of, after all, it was illegal. Not talk so much about that.
And yet, historically, it's huge. I mean, when I look at the sex workers' movement today internationally, and people looking for civil rights, and so many men and women saying, well, this is my work. It's a labor issue. My private life, I happen to be gay or I happen to be bi. That was the very beginning of those discussions. But even then, it was something we kept to ourselves.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Urvashi, you know, you've been at the very forefront vanguard of LGBT progressive politics. And I can't think of a better person to reflect on the inextricable link between sex and politics. The work you've done with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, ACLU, your books Virtual Equality and Irresistible Revolution. I've always sensed your work issuing for us to take our sexual difference and dissidents not just to transform this sexual laws and mores, but actually to transform the very basis of society.
And you were mentioning earlier the kind of mainstreaming of gay politics has, if you will, domesticated the transgressive force of queer life. So I wonder if you could say something about how your work over the decades has been at that intersection of sex and politics.
URVASHI VAID: Sure. I mean, sex and politics was kind of-- the conversation, the doing of, the practice of sex and politics was how I got excited about politics and about everything. To me, the conversation was wrapped up with feminism.
And what I want to reflect on for a minute is how in the course of 35 years in the LGBT movement, in many ways I feel like we've moved away from that focus on the politics of gender, sexuality, and maleness, and femaleness. And it's expressed today most in the trans movement and in trans politics. Absolutely, it's there. But in the mainstream LGBT movement or even in the feminist movement, I feel like it's much different than how I experienced it.
So to me, sex is the core of a motivation for all of us. It's like the primary things of, you've got to eat, you've got to have shelter. Sex is right in there, but it's never been regarded as that. Certainly, the classical leftists never regarded it as a central issue, sex or gender. To me, it's like one of those driving human needs and motivations.
And when you look at the apparatuses of social control, whether it's the courts and laws, whether it's religious institutions, whether it's the family, the repression and control of sexual behavior is a central part of all of those disciplinary regimes. Every single one of them that you can think of.
And so that makes me think about sex. And not just sex-- unethical sex. There's good sex and bad sex. And it isn't about performance, it's about ethics. Like violent, coercive sex-- I mean coerced sex-- versus consensual sex. Those were the conversations that I sort of remember having at Gay Community News.
When I was an impressionable 22-year-old that graduated from college and I went to Boston to join the women's movement, that's what I did. And I worked. I got a job as a legal secretary for a couple of lawyers. I sat there and typed. And they looked at me and said, what are you doing here? With a degree from Vassar College, why are you a legal secretary? I said, honestly, I need a job that pays the rent so that I can work my other job, which was in feminist organizations and queer activism.
That's what I was doing at night and on the weekends. And in those days, you never ever thought that you'd get a J-O-B in that work. I mean, there were like two people who got paid to do that work in the whole country, and you weren't going to be one of them. You could just be sure of that, right? So we made up our own careers. Mine was, I was a secretary.
SUSIE BRIGHT: And I didn't know that because I was about your age-- I forget how many years are between us-- out in the West Coast reading these people in Boston, reading you for the first time, and also not knowing how to say your name, but saying, she's incredible. [LAUGHS]
URVASHI VAID: Well, I feel like I came into a kind of a milieu of incredible artists, writers, thinkers, doers, people like me who were thinking about sex and politics and the intersection of that. And Gay Community News was this weekly newspaper actually produced by a collective, believe it or not, to which David was a writer. You contributed. People all over the country.
SUSIE BRIGHT: And that was when men and women did sexual politics together.
URVASHI VAID: Yeah, we worked together. And we argued about everything. Like, why is this cover of a male penis on the-- pic-- There was this barbed wire penis cover that this artist created to dramatize sodomy laws. And it was wonderful. It was a gorgeous graphic. But boy, did the lesbian feminist separatists get pissed about that.
And then the next two weeks later, there was a cover by Jennifer Camper this incredible lesbian cartoonist of a woman with her breasts shown on a motorcycle saying something about her tits. And that got all the gay men. I don't want to see tits in my paper, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
And it was like, we actually had conversations about the ick factor-- ick factor that we had about each other's genitals, about each other's sexual pleasures. And to me, those were formative conversations in which we sort of talked about things with each other, and we were building a movement, and building institutions at the same time that we were having these conversations. And so they were infused with this thinking about sex.
I took that. I went from that right into AIDS activism because AIDS hit all of my people. And we had to do something, so we did. And I do agree with you, David, that that very exciting conversation really did shift into a different direction. So I don't know if I answered your question, Dag, but I just went with that memory.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: I think so.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Well, David, coming to you. I'm struck by a thread that I see in your work as a highly acclaimed journalist, and author, and filmmaker, and that is the relationship between sex and crisis.
So your book Our Fathers provides a powerful chronicle of the Catholic Church sexual abuse crisis. You helped to write The Confession, Governor James McGreevey's memoir-- ex-governor from New Jersey who came out and resigned amid public controversy-- and most recently, How to Survive a Plague, a remarkable documentation of the early era of AIDS and AIDS activism.
I know these are different types of crises. I don't want to conflate them. But I wonder if you could say something about how in each case our inability to talk about sex then compounds itself into a crisis.
DAVID FRANCE: You're absolutely right. That's the area that I'm really fascinated in-- where sex gets us in trouble and why. And there's the medical aspect of it, and there's the cultural aspect of it. But I'll speak to two of the projects that you mentioned, Our Fathers and The Confession.
And this in part picks up on what Urvashi was just saying about how 30 some-odd years ago, we didn't think that there would ever be a kind of a culture that would allow gay people to have any real place in it. It seemed impossible, although we set about trying to do it anyway. So we had a kind of a hubris about it, and it actually kind of worked.
And what interested me about the Catholic Church sexual abuse crisis that blew up in 2001 was the data, the irrefutable data that nobody was talking about, which was that the criminals, the people who were engaging in these criminal offensive behaviors, were gay men. And nobody wanted to say it.
I was working at Newsweek at the time. They wouldn't let me say it at Newsweek. And all these straight people saying, no, we can't do that. We can't say that because it's too dangerous. Well, it was true. It was absolutely true. And to look at that truth taught us things. And that's what Our Fathers' undertaking was, to try to find out who these people were.
And what I discovered is that so many gay men in the '70s after Stonewall crawled out of cultures that were killing them and got to places like San Francisco, and New York, and Los Angeles, and got to the margins of the country in a way to save their own lives. And we never really looked back at the people who couldn't get out, who were still there, who either weren't smart enough to get out, or weren't brave enough to get out, or couldn't afford in one way or another.
And what happened to them? Who did we leave behind when we made our escapes? And I think that's what we found among these priests, that not just the majority, but something like 98% of the cases of sexual abuse that we read about starting in 2001 and going forward-- and we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of children who were sexually abused-- were abused at the hands of men who would be clinically described as homosexual, although they had no identity.
They had no language to discuss it. And what they had instead was a theology that condemned them and made their own self-knowledge almost impossible. And these priests believe that more than anything because they were clinging to the priesthood. The priests who didn't believe it got out and finally made peace with themselves. And so that crisis to me was really fascinating, the crisis where sexuality clashes with, in that case, theology.
And I also was interested with the governor of New Jersey. He was the first sitting governor to come out. And he was totally in the closet. And he was right there in New Jersey, just moments away from New York City. And you know, he could see New York City from his home.
[LAUGHTER]
And yet, he lived in the closet. And so I was fascinated about that. Like, why would you? What would be the factors that you would allow it that you would use to twist your life up like that, and why? And that class was really fascinating to me. But all of this history that I've been kind of working with and trying to make sense of is really a history of a remarkable cultural evolution, or maybe even revolution over the last 30 or 35 years.
And the transformation in the way that we handle sexual orientation has been remarkable and probably the fastest integration of a detested minority, maybe even in world history that it happened so quickly and thoroughly in that period of time. Which is not to say that it's not over. We still have problems throughout the rest of certainly in the United States, if not the rest of the world. And we're seeing awful things happen in parts of Africa and parts of Russia, for example.
I think that's I guess what's been fascinating to me. What does that kind of change mean to the people who benefit from it into the people who don't benefit from it? And I think that's where I've dedicated my work.
URVASHI VAID: I'm struck by-- may I-- why you ascribe these the priests as being homosexual. I have to read your work, that piece of it, to understand that. Because I don't think of that. I think of that behavior just as I don't think of sexual assault of women as being-- it is and it isn't sexual. You know what I mean? It's control, it's power, it's abuse, it's violence. It's many things. Is it sex?
DAVID FRANCE: Well, I'm not saying that it was an expression of sex.
URVASHI VAID: But you're saying--
DAVID FRANCE: But it's an outgrowth of their sexual orientation, and I'll tell you why.
URVASHI VAID: Even though so many of those priests, the pedophilia happened to little girls? Or was it majority boys?
DAVID FRANCE: Well, it's majority not pedophilia. Now, pedophilia clinically means a sexual attraction to preadolescent children, cherubic kind of children in which gender-- and we know this from social science-- the gender of the target is irrelevant. What was happening in the church is a systemic assault and cover up of adolescent, post-adolescent boys. Young men. Very, very, very young men.
URVASHI VAID: And girls.
DAVID FRANCE: Not statistically. Yes, some girls included. Some young women, some older women included. But statistically, the overwhelming data analysis of this population of victims is male post the age of 12 or 13. Mostly 13, 14, 15, right in that age group. And what we know from social science is that those people, who are classified as ephebophiles, are attracted along the lines of their sexual orientation to the targets of their assaults.
Now, the assault itself is not a sexual assault. But the question is, what can we know about that population of men? And Our Fathers is really an examination of the class of 1960 across the country. And that's the class of graduates from seminary that had the highest offense rate of 12% of the graduates of 1960 in the priesthood. We've never seen anything like that before in any other group of people in any other profession. And so I wanted to find out who they were.
URVASHI VAID: OK. In microcosm, this conversation, the discomfort it evokes, the newness of it, the pain of it, that's what talking about sex is about. And I mean, that's why it's important to do.
DAVID FRANCE: Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
SUSIE BRIGHT: And when you talk about people running away-- I'm sorry. It just reminds me. Well, California was a magnet for priests and nuns who decided it's time for a new verse. And it was my first year working in the feminist vibrator store you know. And when these two women came in, and very shyly asked me-- and this doesn't look like what sex stores look like today. We had a museum of antiques on one wall, and then these things that look like something left over from the blender department plugged into the wall.
It wasn't a snazzy, slick atmosphere. But I was very game and, yes, I'll show you how everything works. And they were so adoring and affectionate. And I said, where did you meet each other? And they said, the convent, of course.
[LAUGHTER]
And you're just reminding me there was this kind of like, we're here. You know, now life begins.
DAVID FRANCE: The Wizard of Oz thing.
SUSIE BRIGHT: The Wizard of Oz, yeah. Everything is in color.
DAVID FRANCE: And not everybody could do it.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Not everyone could do it. It's so--
URVASHI VAID: You know, when you said earlier that you were thinking about when you were interested in where sex gets us into trouble, I immediately thought of Anthony Weiner. [LAUGHS] I didn't go to the priests, I went to Anthony Weiner. And I was thinking, because I remember when he got into trouble thinking, my goodness, he's doing that classic heterosexual man thing of, I didn't do it. Oh, I didn't do it.
And then you get caught and doing it, and then you have to say, I'll never do it again, and then you get caught doing it again. And then, instead of having the space to say, yeah, you know. I mean, can you imagine if we lived in a truly sexually free society, he could have stood up and said, listen, that's my kink. You know what I mean? I text, I sext.
DAVID FRANCE: It was the weekend.
URVASHI VAID: It harms nobody. My wife knows about it. It's all right. So go away, people. I mean, you can't even imagine a private figure saying that in their life, much less a public figure. And I feel that same way about Hilary and Bill. I thought, well, if they had an open understanding in their relationship-- which I don't know that they did. But I don't know. But I said, if they did, would they even be able to express it in public? No.
He had to do that thing where it was like-- Kate, my partner who's a comedian, used to joke that it was a very gay moment, both Weiner and Clinton, because they had to like, it was all about the sex scandal. They had to backtrack. They were afraid of losing their jobs. It was like they had to cover up themselves. And it would be so much more wonderful if they could be honest, if straight people could be honest about sex, too.
DAVID FRANCE: I'm reminded of an example, though, where-- it wasn't a straight example, but it was a political example where Gerry Studds-- you remember when he got caught having sex with a page.
URVASHI VAID: Page boys.
DAVID FRANCE: And you would have thought that could have it's going to ruin his career. And instead he held a press conference and said, yeah, and he was old enough. Like, that was his only defense. And he was 18 years old, and that was defense enough at that time. And going to that kind of cyclical thing, in the early '80s when he did that, we were still willing to go, OK, sexuality is a regular part of a person's life expression.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Well, this actually leads me to ask in terms of the selfie and the vibrator. By the way, these are images from the show. And there's one image we have of a vibrator from the 1900s. So it looks like a-- doesn't look like a Hitachi Magic Wand, let me just put it that way.
But I wonder if you all could-- sorry-- if you all could comment on the new technologies. From selfies-- I'm sure there are a lot of selfies in the audience if we were to check phones-- online porn, sex sites, to dating apps like Grindr and Tinder. They're changing our relationship to our bodies, but also to the body politic. So I wonder how you see what technology is doing to intimacy, but also our relationship more broadly to the body politic.
DAVID FRANCE: I thought when the kind of digital universe came online that it was opening up sexuality again, certainly making it easier to have that kind of expression in public, and also easier to get caught, and harder to deny. Which are all good things, I think, somehow. But I also think that the social media has a kind of a false familiarity about it in that, in some way, it hasn't given us back a kind of a conversation, although we might be engaged in a conversation now even more than before.
And the Grindr thing, those app things that people are constantly studying, and paying attention to, and using, and utilizing, it's not the same as community and of that idea that both Susie and Urvashi were talking about-- of discussion, of community input, and working together on ideas, challenging one another on ideas. And actually, that's what it is-- adding ideas to sex. And maybe what these modalities that you described are doing is stripping ideas away from sex.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Well, I'm really mad there's not a lesbian Grindr. And you know, why can't you just pick up something and say there's a woman down that hall. She'd like to meet me in five minutes. I mean, I was fascinated--
URVASHI VAID: We have a name for it. It's called FindHer. But one of you who's a genius with programming should create that.
DAVID FRANCE: Yes.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Oh, I see you have the concept and the brand name, but not--
URVASHI VAID: But please credit Kate Clinton with the name, FindHer, with like, a tiny percentage of the revenant.
SUSIE BRIGHT: But GrindHer is also good.
[LAUGHTER]
URVASHI VAID: GrindHer.
SUSIE BRIGHT: I think FindHer is sort of the YA version.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know. But I often am thinking, with all the technology, when you see the same conservative attitudes the way it's set up, that women are searching for romance and true love with one person, forever and ever, amen. And then, oh, you guys. We all know you want a quickie in the dark with Anthony Weiner, and goodbye. And so those kind of the idea that you can have this amazing technology but really Ozzie and Harriet ideas about sex as a big bore.
URVASHI VAID: But there's also-- yeah.
SUSIE BRIGHT: I mean, a lot of you may know, when you think about vibrator technology, that that marvelous book by-- help me with this. Rachel?
AUDIENCE: Maines.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Maines. We said Natalie Maines. She's the Dixie Chick. No, Rachel Maines wrote The Technology of Orgasm because she was a scholar in women's crafts and she was studying knitting.
And she went to a University that had archived knitting magazines and she said, why is there a vibrator ad in every knitting magazine? This advertising doesn't exist anywhere else, and that's what set her on her path. And then she discovers what the meaning of this electrical device was, along with the iron and the lamp. You know, it changed everything. That was how her search began.
I know this has already happened hundreds of times in our archive here, and it's going to continue literally pulling a thread and following it someplace else. I mean, technology wise, On Our Backs was able to publish after that first issue that cost an arm and a leg because we bought one of the first Macs. And it was the first media ever produced on an Apple. And I was always like, when is Steve Jobs going to call us and say thank you?
I mean, they said we could do it, but nobody did it. And it was people who were looking for a way to literally get the means of production, and we were just desperate to break the cost and make it accessible. So there's a lot of little triumphs along the way.
And of course, a lot of you have had those conversations that we wouldn't have. Beta, then VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, all of that has happened because of the sex film industry. They set the standard.
I mean, I can remember sitting in a room. We'll talk about this tomorrow when I do my movie show. There's this literally a group of guys who play gin rummy every week, and they run the traditional porn film business, and discussing Beta versus VHS. And they knew they were going to be the ones to make the shoe drop. So you know, I have a love-hate relationship. But observing it and chronicling it is always going to be fascinating.
URVASHI VAID: I have to confess, I don't use the new technology for sex.
SUSIE BRIGHT: You stopped at the vibrator.
URVASHI VAID: I stopped at the vibrator [LAUGHS] in the sense that I think that the sexism and the racism of those spaces also just annoys me and disturbs me. And so you still see those ads that we banned in Gay Community News in the classifieds, the sex classifieds, where people say, no fats, no femmes, no Blacks. Like, those were advertisements in sex ads. And I think they're offensive, and they still exist.
And of course, on the one hand, you could say if you're a libertarian, well, people are just trying to find their choice, and they're just being upfront about it. On the other hand, I think it's just revolting. But that's me being judgmental.
I also kind of resent the corporate control and the commodification of sex. And I resent it. I think I don't know how to get around it in the sense that I use the technologies for a million other things-- to communicate, to interface, to use social media-- and enjoy it.
But I find that I'm still so old school that I don't trust the state and I don't trust corporations. So I worry about all of that information. And Ed Snowden suggests that we should be worried because somebody is indeed compiling it, and for no good purpose, or any purpose. But they're compiling it.
That said, I think you can't be a Luddite. And the way people are meeting each other, the way people are hooking up in cities, the way my friends who are single or hooking up is through dating websites. And they're not going to-- but folks, my advice, join an organization. Get involved in a movement. Don't just tweet, go volunteer. That's where you'll meet the hot chicks.
[APPLAUSE]
SUSIE BRIGHT: You know, when you're being a sexual anthropologist, the crudeness of personal ads, I love reading older ads and seeing what people didn't want and what they did want. And some things are always the same. Size queens have never gone out of style. But I remember when ads were first in women's community newspapers and you would see things like, no fluffs. And I remember wondering, what's a fluff? No femmes, no butches. Soft butch only. And I'd be like when does the butch start to go soft? You know, like.
[LAUGHTER]
But I remember thinking that at the time being scared, being mesmerized that some people were going to just be this cut and dried about it. Of course, I thought it was rude, but I learned so much. And then later on, you look back on it and you see things come and go. You see how something becomes obsessions for personal appearance or style. I just love looking at it now, as long as I don't have to be in the thick of it.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Well, why don't we watch a short clip from How to Survive a Plague? And it would be great for you all to just comment on all the loss, but also all the creativity in terms of when you're saying get organized.
SUSIE BRIGHT: Do we get to scoot our chairs?
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Yeah. And then we'll open it up. We're running out of time, but we'll open it up for discussion because we want to hear what the audience has to say.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- [INAUDIBLE] except, of course, we have Anne Northrup giving her sound bites [INAUDIBLE]
[CHEERING]
- We want everybody to join us, to support us, to destroy the power of the Catholic Church, to make our side a strong one. And to do that, we must put out the message that we are the ones who are fighting for people's lives and they are the murderers.
Don't be afraid of the media. You're talking through them to the public. We are trying to arouse to anger and action, and hone it down to a, yes, a three-second bite, a five-second bite. Just a phrase that will have an impact that will say something specific. And it will be understandable. So.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
- [INAUDIBLE]
- I don't have a phrase worked out, so you're all going to have to create your own. So this is empowerment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CROWD SHOUTING]
- (SINGING) [INAUDIBLE], sweet Jesus, won't you help me [INAUDIBLE] you.
- This is Jesus Christ. I'm in front of St Patrick's Cathedral on Sunday. We're here reporting on a major AIDS activist and an abortion rights activist demonstration, which will be taking place here all morning. Inside, Cardinal O'Connor is busy spreading his lies and rumors about the position of lesbians and gays. We're here to say, we want to go to heaven too.
- Recent publicity indicates a possibility of protest activity occurring within the Cathedral. We wish you remind all visitors to respect the prayerful atmosphere at the Cathedral today.
- JC here, with the Fire and Brimstone Network and we'd like to ask you a little bit about this large vision that you've visited upon us.
- Well, we decided to rename the Cardinal. He's now Cardinal O'Condom. This is our message to him that condoms are safe. It's no sin.
- And he then told them what was going to that didn't happen.
- Why are you murdering us?
[CROWD SHOUTING]
- Stop the madness!
- If everyone here could stand and pray. Our father--
- Prayers won't save the 1 to 1.5 million people infected by Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
[WHISTLE BLOWING]
- Stop killing us! Stop killing us! Stop killing us! We're not going to take it anymore! You're killing us! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! How many more have to die? How many more have to die? Saving lives before [INAUDIBLE]
- Those protesting believe that the protests will result in some change in environments and change of attitudes, perhaps. The church will be teaching that normal sexual activity is sinful until the end of time. That won't change.
[END PLAYBACK]
DAVID FRANCE: Well, I guess it speaks for itself. One of the things that I found so refreshing about showing this film today, to bringing this history forward is how people respond to Jesse Helms by laughing at him, because he seems so ridiculous. And that's a victory in itself, made possible by actions like this that sought to just set him apart as ridiculous.
When, in fact, at the time, as anybody who knows that history knows, he was the power in the Senate. He was the reason we didn't have a federal government response to the AIDS epidemic. He attached something called the Helms Amendment to all funding bills that prohibited spending any US government money on anything which he deemed to be positive toward or encouraging of--
URVASHI VAID: The no promo homo--
DAVID FRANCE: --homosexuality.
URVASHI VAID: --amendments.
DAVID FRANCE: So-- but that he seems so ridiculous now, in history, is, I think, one of the victories of ACT UP and AIDS activism.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Although, Ted Cruz recently tried to bring him up as an exemplary figure. This was about six months ago.
DAVID FRANCE: Yeah, it won't work. There's-- there are a number of people who had a late in life conversion about their relationship to AIDS. And Jesse Helms was one of those. He took a visit from Bono and then went, oh, yeah, I was kind of wrong.
And so, for the last 15 minutes of his life, he tried to talk about AIDS in Africa. But he never made an apology to the gay community or to Americans whose suffering he encouraged and applauded. So I think, ultimately, we can say very clearly that he never made it to heaven.
[LAUGHTER]
URVASHI VAID: I don't know. I think-- I'm a Hindu. We don't believe in heaven. So I get it. But I was thinking about a couple of things in this clip that-- the creativity of AIDS activism and ACT UP, in particular, ACT UP, New York and ACT UP all over the world was amazing.
And it's something that-- it was inspiring to live through and be a part of. And it was really hellish, because when we were doing actions in the '80s-- and I was living in DC. And I did a lot of DC-based actions. And then I organized all these direct actions at the Republican Convention and the Democratic conventions in 1988, both conventions '92, '96. And the hostility you got, the negativity you got was intense.
I remember, once, in Houston at the Republican Convention, these Young Americans for Freedom showed up in their suits with masks on saying-- and signs at one of our demonstrations saying, AIDS is the cure. And they had these hospital masks so they wouldn't get contaminated. And that was young people and in that party. And I think it's really important.
So to me, the second point that comes up from these clips is yes, Helms, we can see him as an isolated figure. But I think he was a spokesman for a view that still exists very much in this country, a view that homosexuality is immoral, sinful, wrong. And that's where the work of people who are working inside religious traditions to reframe that is so important.
That's where there's a huge amount of work still to be done in-- across the country. It isn't over, folks, despite the wins that we've had. It's far from over.
And we have to really remember, look at history to remember the cyclical nature of repression And. the ways that it recurs. So I'm just-- I just always have a suitcase packed on the back porch to run away and go underground. [LAUGHS]
SUSIE BRIGHT: I just love your movie. And I'll let us--
URVASHI VAID: It's a wonderful movie.
SUSIE BRIGHT: --go watch it over and over again.
DAGWAMI WOUBSHET: Wonderful
SUSIE BRIGHT: And the-- oh, what you were talking about, just the look on their faces when they're all sitting in the truck and they've just accomplished it. And that-- there is something very satisfying about exposing hypocrisy and knowing you have the guts to do it. And you're not going to turn back.
Relish those moments and inspiring people when they see this or when they see anything in our archives that makes them think, really? That happened when, then? When we look at some of the photographs of Radcliffe Hall in her top coat and we're like, she didn't give a damn.
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: That's right, yeah.
SUSIE BRIGHT: That-- she just wrote The Well of Loneliness, and dressed as she pleased, and was transgender warrior before anybody had-- put any of those words together. So yeah, there's-- we have an inspiring collection.
URVASHI VAID: Yeah, the movie is really-- can we show another clip?
DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Sure, I just wanted to say, this is a line I picked up, Suzy, from your memoir. I thought, it's such-- just the wisdom in it. You say, perhaps, because we are blunt about sex, we're not so afraid of death's taboo either. And I think there is a relationship. When we take ownership of our sexuality, sexual lives, then that-- our relationship to death also necessarily changes.
SUSIE BRIGHT: It's so true. And then when you had HIV and AIDS-- capital letters-- we were dealing with sex and death simultaneously at very young ages. All of a sudden, this wasn't even like a beautiful literary metaphor. It was just right there.
But that sentiment that we can do this, and we have ownership of our bodies, and the way we're going to die or the way we're going to live, from my women's movement side, that came so much out of midwifery and self-help groups. And grab that cervix, and let's take a look. And this is my uterus, my vagina, my clitoris, et cetera, all of that.
And I'm going to decide how I want to give birth, or how I want to administer my own abortion, or all these things. You take the same notion and it informed hospice and death midwifery today. We went from that women's movement, our bodies ourselves, to a kind of roll up your sleeves on gay activism, to saying, I'm never, no matter what I face in life and what kind of death or illness may come my way, this-- I'm not just saying, I have a slip to see the hospital, they will determine how I do this.
No one's ever going to say that again. And I think that's one of the biggest influences in health care today is how you will die. And if you know how to talk about sex, you're just at the head of the class.
AUDIENCE: Uh-oh
URVASHI VAID: Time's up, I guess.
ANNE KENNEY: I know, there's just a bunch of questions and comments. And I, for one, want to know what's the difference between a feminist vibrator and a nonfeminist vibrator. But I'm going to ask them, Suzy, when we go over to the exhibit and the reception, which is right after this.
And it's in our wonderful Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. You can walk over to Stimpson and go down the elevator. I'm conscious of not wanting to cut this off but also honoring those who prepared a beautiful reception for us.
I want to thank the staff of the library, Brenda Marston, Aisha Neely, and Kathryn Raven, and CJ Lance, and Lynn Bertoia, and Glenn Glaser, and Joan Faculte. There's a whole bunch of them. David opened the door of the closet door of the card catalog by referencing homosexuality. I'm particularly pleased that the good staff at the Cornell Library introduced to the Library of Congress subject heading terms, bears, gay sex culture, butch, and femme.
Dagmawi Woubshet, associate professor of English at Cornell, moderated a panel discussion about saving the history of sexuality March 18, 2014, to open 'Speaking of Sex,' a new exhibition at Cornell University Library celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Human Sexuality Collection.
The conversation featured activist and author Urvashi Vaid, pioneering feminist sex writer Susie Bright, and "How to Survive a Plague" director/producer David France.
The event was co-sponsored by the LGBT Resource Center, LGBT Studies, and the Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Cornell. Speaking of Sex will be on view until National Coming Out Day on October 11th, and features rare books, photographs, original artwork, erotica, and all sorts of ephemera related to sexuality.
