Sexing History

In the 1960s, Papa Joe’s in Roanoke, Virginia, became the very first club in the state and among the earliest in the nation to feature topless dancing. While some heralded Papa Joe’s owner, George Christofis, as a sexual revolutionary, many religious leaders and local residents condemned him. But Papa Joe’s history is not a simple tale of moral outrage in a part of the country that birthed the Religious Right. Instead, the story of Papa Joe’s reveals how sexual entertainment flourished on Southern soil while upholding the color line.

For nearly half a century, Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halverson Boyd have devoted their lives to providing safe and affirming abortion care. Curtis, a former Baptist minister, began providing abortions in Texas before the procedure was legal in the state. After Roe, with the help of an interfaith network of clergy, Curtis opened up a clinic in Dallas. In the 1970s, Glenna came to work there as well, and the two eventually fell in love. Their partnership and shared commitment to abortion care has enabled them to withstand the increasing violence of the anti-abortion movement and to continue providing abortions to this day. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis Assistant Producers: Mallory Szymanski To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com

In this episode, we’ll be taking a cue from Santa Claus and sketching a naughty and nice history of festive sexual expressions. So, grab your eggnog, curl up by the fire and join us as we explore the ghosts of Christmas nights past. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis Assistant Producers: Stephen Colbrook and Mallory Szymanski Research Associates: Caroline Azdell, Katie Kenny and Felix Yeung. To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com

How do you come out in a religious community that loves you conditionally? What do you tell yourself about your faith and your desires when your Church views your sexuality as disordered? In this episode of Sexing History, we focus on the experiences of three gay men who were priests or seminarians in the St. Louis diocese beginning in the 1990s. Their overlapping stories, their friendships, their faith, and the ways in which they came out to themselves and each other within Catholic institutions, speak to the intertwined histories of desire and devotion. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis Assistant Producers: Stephen Colbrook and Mallory Szymanski Research Associates: Katie Kenny and Felix Yeung. Interns: Hugh MacNeil, Ian McCabe and Emily Vaughn. Thank you to Brian McNaught, Gary Meier, Phil Tiemeyer, and Jeff Vomund for sharing their stories with us. To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes and share us on social media.

Straight white men’s sexuality is too often imagined as natural, timeless, and unchanging. In The Pickup Artist, we showcase the 1970 bestseller, How to Pick Up Girls, in order to explore the cultural forces that have shaped how white men experienced and publicly expressed their desire for women in increasingly casual and aggressive ways. How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber was a mass-marketed book that advised men on how to introduce themselves to and seduce women. The book spawned several sequels and countless imitators. But more importantly, How to Pick Up Girls represented the triumph of a male-dominated sexual revolution that allowed men to demand ever-greater access to any woman’s time, body, and attention. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski Interns: Katie Kenny, Hugh MacNeil, Ian McCabe, Emily Vaughn and Felix Yeung. Julia Zaksek provided research assistance on this episode. To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes and share us on social media. 

The story of African American midwifery is part of a larger history of Black women’s struggles to protect their own lives, as well as the lives of other Black women and their children. This episode explores the long history of African American midwives, doulas, and birth attendants who have labored to ensure the safety and dignity of Black mothers and their children in and beyond the maternity ward. These women have worked to provide emotional support and medical advocacy for other pregnant and laboring African American women. Their reproductive advocacy makes clear that the delivery room has become an important site to ensure that Black lives matter. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes and share us on social media. 

Welcome to a bonus track from Sexing History. This track features an extended version of Gillian Frank’s interview with Marabel Morgan from our episode “Touch Me, I’m Yours.” That episode explores how Evangelical women responded to and contributed to the sexualization of American culture in the 1970s. In 1973, Marabel Morgan’s marriage guide, The Total Woman, became a bestseller and a cultural sensation. Millions of people read The Total Woman and thousands signed up for her classes. These classes offered marital advice and included sexual assignments for wives such as asking them to dress up in sexy lingerie, exotic costumes and “to be prepared for sexual intercourse every night for a week.” Historians and cultural commentators frequently refer to Marabel Morgan’s ideas and to her influence. Although she was a fixture on television during the 1970s, recorded interviews with Marabel Morgan are nearly impossible to find. We are therefore delighted to share this extended interview with Marabel Morgan in which she shares her memories about her childhood, her marriage, the changing meaning of her faith, and how writing The Total Woman changed her life. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski If you enjoyed this bonus track, please review us on iTunes or Soundcloud and share us on social media.  Please support our work and keep new episodes coming by making a small donation to Sexing History. 

Season 2, Episode 6: Against Our Will

Season 2, Episode 5: Let's Dance!

For a short time in the 1970s, Canary Conn was everywhere. She was on television. On the radio. And on bookshelves. Her story, that of a Texas-born recording artist, husband and father who transitioned into a woman whom the media described as “young,” “lithe” and “with flowing blonde hair,” captured national attention. Although some newspaper interviews with Canary have been preserved, there are very few accessible recordings of Canary’s many public performances, or her radio and television interviews. What’s more, the trail of evidence disappears after 1980, when Canary inexplicably left the public spotlight and returned to private life. In this episode we introduce and then play a rare extended audio interview with Canary that she recorded with the magazine Psychology Today in 1977. The interview profiles Canary’s childhood, her transition, her sexuality, and her gender identity.

In August of 1962, Sherri Chessen boarded a flight to Sweden in order to get an abortion after she was unable to obtain one in the United States. Sherri had accidentally taken medicine containing thalidomide, a drug that caused children to be born with internal injuries and shortened limbs. Thalidomide also caused women to miscarry, deliver stillborn babies, or have children who died during their infancy. Her decision to terminate this risky pregnancy and her journey abroad attracted international attention from journalists, politicians, and religious leaders. Sherri’s ordeal made public what countless American women experienced when they sought to terminate their pregnancies. Her widely shared story changed the way many Americans thought about abortion laws and even about abortion itself. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman. Producers: Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore and Jayne Swift. Intern: Alexie Glover. Music: “Plaster Combo,” “Building the Sled,” “Mogul,” “The Basket,” “Taoudella,” “Silk and Silver,” “The Yards,” “Arbic Tallow,” “Velvet Ladder,” “The Telling,” “Midday,” “Guinea,” “Vittoro,” “Cases to Rest,” and “Skyway” by Blue Dot Sessions. Sherri Chessen, “The Lesser of Two Evils,” (1966) courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives. Our gratitude goes out to Sherri Chessen for sharing her story with us. If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes or Soundcloud and share us on social media. Please support our work and keep new episodes coming by making a small donation to Sexing History.

Welcome to a bonus track from Sexing History. This track features an extended version of Gillian Frank’s interview with Mark S. King from our most recent episode “Sex Over the Phone.” That episode explores how phone sex lines and dial-a-porn transformed the intimacy of phone conversations into a multi-million-dollar sexual enterprise during the 1980s. Mark S. King worked on gay phone sex lines and also owned his own phone sex business. His story helps us better understand the complex relationships between gay history, the history of sex work, the history of the AIDS epidemic and the telecommunications revolution of the 1980s. Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman. Producers: Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore and Jayne Swift.  Intern: Alexie Glover. If you enjoyed this bonus track, please review us on iTunes or Soundcloud and share us on social media.  Please support our work and keep new episodes coming by making a small donation to Sexing History. 

For years, telephone companies had been encouraging customers to “reach out and touch someone.” In the 1980s, phone sex lines and dial-a-porn transformed the intimacy of phone conversations into a multi-million-dollar sexual enterprise. A simple and relatively cheap phone call could connect you with dial-a-porn, a telephone service offering short erotic recordings. Phone sex lines were more expensive, and featured operators, known as fantasy artists, who would act out sexual fantasies for and with you. Over the course of the 1980s, telephones, credit cards and imaginations brought countless people together to co-create sexual fantasies, and experience new forms of sexual gratification.

The hit television show American Bandstand has shaped how we understand the 1950s and early 1960s. For many, American Bandstand still evokes nostalgic images of white youth culture and sexually innocent teenage romance: a world made up of malt shops, juke joints, sock hops and drive-in movie theaters. If we look closer at how Bandstand was staged, and what was hidden from sight or hiding in plain view, we can see how the show's creators erased blackness and queerness from the show itself and from the official story of youth culture.

Chances are you’ve never heard of Ruth Wallis, one of the greatest singers, comedians, and performers of sexually suggestive lyrics in the postwar United States. Most of her catalogue remains on vinyl and historians have forgotten her. But from the 1940s until the early 1970s, Ruth Wallis was a bestselling performer and a mainstay at supper clubs and hotels. At a time when it was legally risky for entertainers to sing about sexuality for profit and pleasure, Ruth sold millions of records that used innuendo to playfully hint at a variety of straight and queer sexual pleasures. https://www.sexinghistory.com/episode-8 Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman. Producers: Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui and Devin McGeehan Muchmore. Intern: Jayne Swift. Special thanks to Alan Pastman, Mitch Douglas and Rusty Warren for sharing their stories with us. Thank you to Jennifer Caplan and Lauren Sklaroff for sharing their historical expertise with us. Thank you to Alan Pastman for sharing his personal archive. If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes or Soundcloud and share us on social media. Please support our work and keep new episodes coming by making a small donation to Sexing History.