Benjamin Franklin’s dalliances with a cod may not seem particularly notable, given his other exploits.
Tag: heterosexuality
The Hunger of the Finnish Bachelor: Married Men, Desire & Domesticity in 20th Century Finland
Summer widowers might attempt to recapture the erotic possibility of their single days.
Out in the Open: Rural Life, Respectability, and the Nudist Park
Brian Hoffman In the early 1930s, after attending a showing of This Nude World at the Castle Theater in Chicago, Alois Knapp and his wife Lorena decided to convert their 200-acre farm located in Roselawn, Indiana into a nudist camp. Although they had never dreamed that they would go into […]
Revisiting Love’s ‘Golden Age’
Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones In the first week of July, we were among over two hundred historians who attended the Rethinking Modern British Studies conference at the University of Birmingham. Alongside our own panel on religion and sexuality, a number of the plenary speakers and the concurrent sessions […]
“What can I do to be normal?” Queer Female Desire in Letters to Dr. Alfred Kinsey
Amanda Littauer In 1949, a year after the publication of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s notorious Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a young African American woman from the Bronx sent Kinsey a private letter lamenting the “queer control” she seemed to have over other women. These women, she explained, would literally […]
Interracialintimacies.org: An Online Interactive Archives and Teaching Tool
Mavis’ family photo album opened a door on a life of interracial intimacy.
Red War on the Family: An Interview with Erica Ryan
Interview by Christina Simmons Erica Ryan’s Red War on the Family (Temple 2014) argues that the first Red Scare–the backlash against and anxiety about domestic and foreign radicals–and its organizational progeny not only deeply shaped the American political world of the 1920s but also fundamentally affected ideas and practices of sexuality […]