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Sex in the archives: Writing American sexual histories
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. Shedding new light on American sexual history, the topics covered are both fascinating and the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city.
This book will appeal to a wide those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
This book will appeal to a wide those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
304 pages, Paperback
Published December 10, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 19, 2024
i could only wish to write a history like this
April 7, 2024
Reay's book looks at the relationship between eroticism, sexuality & the archives. Based on earlier work he completed it complies both personal archives about sexuality & institutional archives & how they inform our modern ideas about sexuality.
Or the archive can be in a room in an apartment, the product of one persons private obsessions. In 2007, while working on New York Hustlers (2010), I contacted an artist called Richard Taddei, who had known the aforementioned Melcarth. It transpired that Taddei also painted and photographed hustlers, but those of another generation-Melcath in the 1950s and 1960s, and Taddei in the 1980s and 1990s. [7] 3
…but no less interesting, aspects of archival work, the jostling for a prime seat, the petty bureaucracies, the disappointments, the physicality of inquiry, what Natalie Zemon Davis has termed the experience of research, the smells, the feeling, the dust. [5. N.Z. Davis, “Foreward,” in A. Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans., T. Scott-Railton (New Haven: CT, 2013), pp.1x-xvi] 7
The archive of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was dispersed after its partial, Nazi-initiated destruction in 1933. There are fragments in archives in London and Berlin and in the Kinsey Institute Library. There should also be boxes of his papers at the University of Minnesota, but the suitcase of documents located in Vancouver and saved from the garbage, purchased, and then destined for Minnesota, arrived empty! [91. H. Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, 2017), pp.3-4] 16-17
Certainly archives are never static. The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, in Canada, is a relatively new archive (2011), formed out of the collection of Rikki Swan and the papers of Reed Erickson. [124] 21
Melcarth does not appear in the published memoirs of either Williams or Vidal. However, both were acquainted with the artist and with the aforementioned Painter, one of Melcarth’s closest friends and himself no mean photographer. These men swapped photographs and contacts in the 1940s and 1950s. 39
Melcarth, who would have been horrified to be described as gay rather than homosexual, once said that he needed daily sex for his creativity, cruising every night ‘like a mad thing,’ sometimes all night, leaving little time for actual work. [32] Like numerous homosexual men from the 1930s through to the late 1960s-including his friend the writer Gore Vidal and Vidal’s friend the playwright Tennessee Williams-Melcarth was attracted to ‘trade’, the term for ostensibly straight, usually working-class men who might engage in homosexual sex. 39
A gay man, interviewed by the historian George Chauncey for his book Gay New York (1994), contrasted the world of the 1930s and 1940s with that of the 1960s and 1970s where the heterosexual-homosexual divided was far more pronounced:
Most of my crowd in the 1930s and 1940s wanted to have sex with a straight man…And a lot of straight boys let us have sex with them. People don’t believe it now. People say now that they must have been gay. But there weren’t. They were straight. [38. Chauncey, Gay New York, 21-22] 40
G. Butt. Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 (Durham, NC, 2005), p5.
J. Boda, “Edward Melcarth: an essay on an enigma,” The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, 29 (2008): 15-16
I have written about our other Kinsey informant Thomas Painter elsewhere, but it is worth encapsulating some of the main details. [94.] This chronicler of New York hustlers from the 1930s to the 1960s provided material to the Kinsey Institute until the early 1970s (after Kinsey’s death); his entire life record in the form of letter-journals, about a thousand photographs, fiction, and drawings. [95] 83
Kinsey’s informant provided a more substantial form of Gavin Butt’s ‘whispering in the archives’, the gossip and queer disclosures referred to earlier in the book. [104] He sent amusingly voyeuristic (and somewhat grainy) snaps of the physique photographer Lon photographing and then picking up young men on the beach in 1949…85
He [Samuel Steward] resisted the efforts of several interviews to force him into a post-Stonewall straitjacket. Where were the bars that ‘gay people’ gathers in? ‘Gay people just didn’t gather yet.’ Was there a ‘homosexual identity? ‘I wasn’t particularly aware of that because…ah…it didn’t matter to me.” [134. YUL, Samuel Steward Papers, Box 1, Interview with Samuel Steward’, pp.219-42, quote at p.242] 90
Indeed, Thomas Waugh long ago detected the ‘collaborative dynamic’ in Kinsey’s project, ‘in which knowledge and desire inextricably interplay.’ [141] 91
One of the fascinating aspects of trans history is the rapid shift in sexual configuration. The transgender community emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, more diverse than the older transsexual community (which it incorporated)….Transgender included people who wanted to create and/or retain characteristics of both genders and who saw themselves as neither or both male and female. [10. A. Colin, “Transcending and transgendering: male-to-female transsexuals, dichotomy and diversity,” in G. Herdt (ed.) Third Sex, Third Gender (New York, 1996), ch.10]…The internet has played a significant role in this recent history; Beemyn and Rankin’s survey argued that it was crucial to transgender identity work among younger trans participants. [11. G. Beemyn and S. Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People (New York, 2011), pp.23-6]
Transgender has become so established in the American cultural psyche that it is difficult to imagine another time. We are concerned here with this earlier phase of trans history, from the 1960s to the 1980s, before the Internet, when sexual and gender definitions and categories were more fixed, and many experts, and many so-termed transvestites and transsexuals, thought that they knew exactly what transvestism and transsexuality were. Transvestites cross-dressed but did not want to be the sex of those whose clothing they wore. Cross-dressng in female garb was common; cross-dressing in male clothing was rare. Transsexuals, on the other hand, saw their bodies as a kind of dress and wanted to rearrange them to correspond to their true being: male-to-female transsexuals modified their bodies to reflect their essential femaleness; female-to-male transsexuals adapted to correspond to their masculinity. And trans men were less common than trans women. 133
White’s Mineshaft is farm more than a dark space with slings for fucking or being fucked. It represents a wider cultural moment where sex has become everything: ‘our sole mode of transcendence and our only touchstone of authenticity.’ [26. E. White, States of Desire (New York, 1980) p.22] 159
Bowie’s AIDS reporting is very different to Eric Michael’s late 1980s Unbecoming, a deeply reflective work. 163
Or the archive can be in a room in an apartment, the product of one persons private obsessions. In 2007, while working on New York Hustlers (2010), I contacted an artist called Richard Taddei, who had known the aforementioned Melcarth. It transpired that Taddei also painted and photographed hustlers, but those of another generation-Melcath in the 1950s and 1960s, and Taddei in the 1980s and 1990s. [7] 3
…but no less interesting, aspects of archival work, the jostling for a prime seat, the petty bureaucracies, the disappointments, the physicality of inquiry, what Natalie Zemon Davis has termed the experience of research, the smells, the feeling, the dust. [5. N.Z. Davis, “Foreward,” in A. Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans., T. Scott-Railton (New Haven: CT, 2013), pp.1x-xvi] 7
The archive of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was dispersed after its partial, Nazi-initiated destruction in 1933. There are fragments in archives in London and Berlin and in the Kinsey Institute Library. There should also be boxes of his papers at the University of Minnesota, but the suitcase of documents located in Vancouver and saved from the garbage, purchased, and then destined for Minnesota, arrived empty! [91. H. Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, 2017), pp.3-4] 16-17
Certainly archives are never static. The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, in Canada, is a relatively new archive (2011), formed out of the collection of Rikki Swan and the papers of Reed Erickson. [124] 21
Melcarth does not appear in the published memoirs of either Williams or Vidal. However, both were acquainted with the artist and with the aforementioned Painter, one of Melcarth’s closest friends and himself no mean photographer. These men swapped photographs and contacts in the 1940s and 1950s. 39
Melcarth, who would have been horrified to be described as gay rather than homosexual, once said that he needed daily sex for his creativity, cruising every night ‘like a mad thing,’ sometimes all night, leaving little time for actual work. [32] Like numerous homosexual men from the 1930s through to the late 1960s-including his friend the writer Gore Vidal and Vidal’s friend the playwright Tennessee Williams-Melcarth was attracted to ‘trade’, the term for ostensibly straight, usually working-class men who might engage in homosexual sex. 39
A gay man, interviewed by the historian George Chauncey for his book Gay New York (1994), contrasted the world of the 1930s and 1940s with that of the 1960s and 1970s where the heterosexual-homosexual divided was far more pronounced:
Most of my crowd in the 1930s and 1940s wanted to have sex with a straight man…And a lot of straight boys let us have sex with them. People don’t believe it now. People say now that they must have been gay. But there weren’t. They were straight. [38. Chauncey, Gay New York, 21-22] 40
G. Butt. Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 (Durham, NC, 2005), p5.
J. Boda, “Edward Melcarth: an essay on an enigma,” The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, 29 (2008): 15-16
I have written about our other Kinsey informant Thomas Painter elsewhere, but it is worth encapsulating some of the main details. [94.] This chronicler of New York hustlers from the 1930s to the 1960s provided material to the Kinsey Institute until the early 1970s (after Kinsey’s death); his entire life record in the form of letter-journals, about a thousand photographs, fiction, and drawings. [95] 83
Kinsey’s informant provided a more substantial form of Gavin Butt’s ‘whispering in the archives’, the gossip and queer disclosures referred to earlier in the book. [104] He sent amusingly voyeuristic (and somewhat grainy) snaps of the physique photographer Lon photographing and then picking up young men on the beach in 1949…85
He [Samuel Steward] resisted the efforts of several interviews to force him into a post-Stonewall straitjacket. Where were the bars that ‘gay people’ gathers in? ‘Gay people just didn’t gather yet.’ Was there a ‘homosexual identity? ‘I wasn’t particularly aware of that because…ah…it didn’t matter to me.” [134. YUL, Samuel Steward Papers, Box 1, Interview with Samuel Steward’, pp.219-42, quote at p.242] 90
Indeed, Thomas Waugh long ago detected the ‘collaborative dynamic’ in Kinsey’s project, ‘in which knowledge and desire inextricably interplay.’ [141] 91
One of the fascinating aspects of trans history is the rapid shift in sexual configuration. The transgender community emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, more diverse than the older transsexual community (which it incorporated)….Transgender included people who wanted to create and/or retain characteristics of both genders and who saw themselves as neither or both male and female. [10. A. Colin, “Transcending and transgendering: male-to-female transsexuals, dichotomy and diversity,” in G. Herdt (ed.) Third Sex, Third Gender (New York, 1996), ch.10]…The internet has played a significant role in this recent history; Beemyn and Rankin’s survey argued that it was crucial to transgender identity work among younger trans participants. [11. G. Beemyn and S. Rankin, The Lives of Transgender People (New York, 2011), pp.23-6]
Transgender has become so established in the American cultural psyche that it is difficult to imagine another time. We are concerned here with this earlier phase of trans history, from the 1960s to the 1980s, before the Internet, when sexual and gender definitions and categories were more fixed, and many experts, and many so-termed transvestites and transsexuals, thought that they knew exactly what transvestism and transsexuality were. Transvestites cross-dressed but did not want to be the sex of those whose clothing they wore. Cross-dressng in female garb was common; cross-dressing in male clothing was rare. Transsexuals, on the other hand, saw their bodies as a kind of dress and wanted to rearrange them to correspond to their true being: male-to-female transsexuals modified their bodies to reflect their essential femaleness; female-to-male transsexuals adapted to correspond to their masculinity. And trans men were less common than trans women. 133
White’s Mineshaft is farm more than a dark space with slings for fucking or being fucked. It represents a wider cultural moment where sex has become everything: ‘our sole mode of transcendence and our only touchstone of authenticity.’ [26. E. White, States of Desire (New York, 1980) p.22] 159
Bowie’s AIDS reporting is very different to Eric Michael’s late 1980s Unbecoming, a deeply reflective work. 163
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