Projecting and Collecting Erotica in the 1950s and the 1990s
Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro, PhD

Younger: . . . So that’s a big deal, when you’re young in the field and that many people know you and respect you and elect you to the governing body of an organization. And I think it’s because she also did the Midwest conference and everybody knew her, and that’s the biggest region, so that helps too. But, Jennifer also had a wonderful job at the Kinsey Institute, and this is her book. It’s called Peek and it’s about the Kinsey Institute collection. And if you don’t know about it, she’s going to tell you what the Kinsey Institute is, but you might have heard about the Kinsey Report, the thing that came out in the 50s about sexual practices of American people. Oh, and I also want to say that she’s the only fellow that we’ve ever had that annotated all the minutes and sent them to me so we could publish them.

Pearson Yamashiro: Hi, everyone, it’s really nice to be here. This is a really important program to me and it meant a lot to me, so I’d like to encourage you to continue to be involved and support Cheryl and Sarah in their endeavors with the program after you leave. The thing that I loved about this experience is the same thing that I love about the Society for Photographic Education, which I am the executive director of. That is that it’s a really warm, welcoming atmosphere, and you get to go and see so much, and hear so much, that’s really stimulating and exciting in the field in such a short time, which I think is really valuable. Actually, I brought little information sheets and memberships for everyone, so I’ll just pass them around. If you have any questions about my current job, I’d be happy to answer those, but most of you will have questions about my previous job.

I’m going to start out by telling you that I really identify myself as a revisionist art historian and a feminist. I’m a revisionist art historian in the sense that I like to go beyond the frame of the work and beyond master works and formal issues. I’m really most interested in viewing works of art in a specific context. I earned my Ph.D. in 19th and 20th century painting and photography in Britain and America, which is my area of expertise, but what I really love is photography and it’s basically what I’ve done all of my research on when I have had a choice. As a feminist, I really believe in the freedom to choose lifestyles and gender roles, and I believe that our identities are multi-layered. Really, in the simplest terms, I see myself as a middle-class, white, heterosexual, anti-censorship feminist, whose primary interest in visual imagery is the exploration of cultural meaning. It’s really my goal to be reasonable and fair when I’m viewing works of art. I don’t know who’s writing about me, but I hope your goal is to be reasonable and fair too.

Younger: I think there’s one thing we should add is Jennifer has always played with these stereotypes that we have. She was a cheerleader but then she plays with that by wearing a pink suit when she goes to the world pornography conference. I love that somebody can actually be playful while being stereotyped.

Pearson Yamashiro: Yeah, so I’m really breaking out today – no pink. I hope you won’t be disappointed but I have a lot less slides to show than I typically do, but I have a lot of ideas that I want to share with you today. So a couple of you nodded your heads when Cheryl asked if you were familiar with Alfred Kinsey, but it’s so essential to understand this photographic archive that really is a national treasure in its historical context. I am going to spend some time introducing the Institute, its early days, the major players, their research project, and then the original function of the collection. I was really invited here today to do a historical comparison of the projection of which I’m viewing as public display of erotica in the 1950s and the 1990s from the Kinsey Institute archive. For the most part, however, the collecting was done in the middle of the century, and the exhibition of the materials didn’t really start happening until the 1980s and 1990s. There’s one primary exception, however, where non-scientists viewed sexually explicit photographs after they were acquired by the institute in the 1950s. This group of photographs became the focal point for a federal obscenity case and it provides an opportunity for us to compare reactions to the photographs during the middle of the century with those at the end of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, the comparison is centered on censorship, which is a fairly negative reaction. I want to let you know that during the public display of images at the end of the 1990s, when I was the curator, and where they’re currently exhibiting materials, the overall reaction has been enormously positive. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression today by making you think that everything that the Institute does has been received negatively by the public--that’s not true at all. I will be showing sexually explicit material, and if this makes you feel uncomfortable, I would like to make sure that you feel free to leave the room. I think you might want to consider why they may make you uncomfortable and where your discomfort stems from, but if this is going to cause any problem for you at all, just please feel free to go outside.

Here’s the outline of my talk. I’m going to do an overview of the Kinsey Institute in its early days like Kinsey’s research and his collection. Then I’ll talk about the original function of the collection since it wasn’t intended for public viewing. Since we are talking about projecting images though, I wanted to mention that while Kinsey was teaching he did show slides, and when he was lecturing in very public spaces, he also showed slides, but they’re probably nothing like the ones that I’ll be showing you this morning. He must have had slides of his charts and diagrams. I know he had some images of bodies, but they weren’t the same sort of images that I’ll be showing you today.

This is a photograph of some of the early Institute staff at a staff meeting. That’s Kinsey’s back that we see. Alfred Kinsey came to Indiana University in 1920 at the age of 26 to teach in the Department of Biology after receiving his doctorate from Harvard. This is Kinsey and his wife, Clara, on their wedding day. He married her the summer after he came to Indiana, so that shows him at the right time period of his life. He wrote a number of books on biology, including high school textbooks, and was well received as a researcher, specializing in studies on the gall wasp.
Here’s a photograph of Kinsey with the gall wasps, or the wasps and their galls, which is like a fungal proliferation. He really chose an area of biology that allowed him to do field research. During the mid-twentieth century, science really represented an area of progress, much in the same way that physical explorations of the United States in the 19th century represented terrain for exploration. It really was the area for progress in exploring. At that same time, science was really coming indoors, and people were doing their work in labs with microscopes rather than out in the field, and Kinsey chose an older path in entomology that allowed him to do what he loved, which was to be part of the natural environment. His father wanted him to get a mechanical/technical training to be an engineer but he didn’t want to.

This is one tray of wasps that he mounted and identified then. He collected over a million specimens during his lifetime and organized all of them like this. So he loved to be in the field, but he also loved to arrange his collection. All of those boxes are full of wasps. This collection is now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Kinsey’s approach, in addition to the field research, was really a taxonomical, one which was comprised of classifying, describing, and making statistical analyses of what he found.

This is Kinsey lecturing at Berkeley University in 1952 to an overflowing audience in a gymnasium. This was at the height of his career. He was comfortable speaking to audiences of any size, and that’s why I included it. He became involved in the emerging field of sex research in 1938, and this coincided with his coordination of a marriage course at Indiana University. The transition from his professional and public persona as a bug specialist to a sex doctor was really most often attributed to his role as the lead faculty member of the new course on marriage being taught at IU. Of course Kinsey had advocated for sex education and expressed interest in this area long before 1938, but the marriage course provided an opportunity for him to express factual information as well as his own views on the subject of sex.

Here, Kinsey is conducting an interview, which was the primary method of gathering material for the sex research. This is actually a staged photograph taken by the staff photographer. The woman supposedly being interviewed is actually the librarian. Once Kinsey started on the path of sex research, his goals became as grand as they had been when he was an entomologist. He aimed to collect 100,000 sexual histories, but not on his own--he had some help. This is a photograph of the main researchers. There is Kinsey on the left. On the top of the pyramid there is Clyde Martin and he joined Kinsey in his efforts in 1939. On the right is Wardell Pomeroy and he came aboard in 1943. The person closest to the book is Paul Gephardt and he joined the team in 1946. I’ve met Clyde Martin and I worked a lot with Paul Gephardt. When I was the curator, he lived in Bloomington and was very generous with his time, coming in to fill in the gaps and the information about the collection. So together, these men collected 18,000 interviews and they worked on this project for 25 years. Based on the wealth of material that they gathered as well as their supplementary data, Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. In 1998 the Institute reprinted it and that is the cover of the reprinted volume. These authors, joined by Paul Gephardt published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. This is a cake that they made at the Institute to celebrate the publication of the book. So Kinsey’s work was really wildly popular and very unexpectedly so, and considered groundbreaking, not only for the conclusions that he made, but also because of the methodology that he used. He applied that same taxonomic methodology that he used as an entomologist to studying human sexual behavior and that was controversial; Kinsey’s fame just spread like wildfire. His works, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Human Female are known as the Kinsey Reports, so in actuality there was no publication that ever came out with that title.

Through the popularity of these publications, Kinsey’s name resonated around the world, and it drew attention in the media, as well as in political, legal and academic discussions. The famous Dr. Kinsey also surfaced in song lyrics. There’s a really good one, “Ooh, Ooh, Dr. Kinsey.” He was even discussed in jokes, polite conversation, magazine covers and cartoons. This one was published in the New York Times in 1948, and it shows a woman surreptitiously reading the male volume, which is hidden inside her Home Gardner magazine.

This is a portrait of Monroe Wheeler who was the Director of Exhibitions and Publications at the Museum of Modern Art. Kinsey collected widely in support of his research, which started out very casually. People he interviewed would say, “You know, Dr. Kinsey, I’ve got this cigar box full of old photographs that are kind of sexy and if you don’t want them I’ll throw them away,” and he’d say, “Don’t do that, I’ll take them.” But he very quickly became interested in expressions of sexual subject matter and started collecting them. He used his vast professional contacts to develop this collection and had people in the arts like Monroe Wheeler, as well as basically anyone he knew, helping him out and aiding him in his goal to collect “supplementary material,” as he called it.
He really had the most resources to collect after the publication of the male volume in 1948. He had a really small window of opportunity for having money and being able to acquire materials widely because of a customs case, which we’ll talk about. So between 1948 and 1952 he really could collect anything without being constrained by a lack of money or being prohibited by the U.S. customs. However, before and after that time period, he was able to make substantial acquisitions through donations, partnerships and trades. This is a slide of one of the first photographs that he collected, and it shows the dancer Tito Valdez and his female partner. They caused a sensation on the New York stage with their love dance and sexy costumes. So this was collected in 1938 and the Institute wasn’t incorporated until 1947.

This is a picture of Cornelia Christianson, on the left and William Dellenbach, who was the staff photographer, in the collection area. When I was there, and I left in the year 2000, we were still using those same cabinets and I’m sure they have them now. So the funds for the collection are really very limited, as are the resources. Kinsey collected diverse materials related to sexuality and especially admired Asian and ancient erotica. You can see some of the vessels on the table; those are ancient Peruvian pots. However, photographs really had special value to his research. The fact that they were affordable and consequently had wide circulation, were among the reasons that the medium was regarded as important and influential. The fact that the photographs were accessible and inexpensive, certainly due in part to the medium’s reproducibility, made them easy to collect. However, he collected photographs not only because he could afford them and he could find them, but also because other people could do the same--that’s what made them valuable to Kinsey. In addition to collecting images, Kinsey later employed various individuals to do photographic copy work. Here is the staff photographer. With his limited resources, I think it’s amazing that he found it valuable enough to have a photographer on staff.

Kinsey collected historical material and contemporary photographs made by amateurs and professionals. This is a really unusual collection because not all of the pieces and in fact, most of the pieces in the collection you wouldn’t probably categorize as fine art. So this is an example of an amateur photograph that is in the collection. Here is an example of something that would be a more typical professional studio shot. Both of these came from the same classification--the female figure. And that’s an enormous category, as you can imagine.

Kinsey’s interest in photography really expanded to include a wide array of subjects from the human figure to sexual activity to certain types of special interests like fetish objects and costumes. This one was made by an artist whose last name is Kootz, and it falls into the category of Fetish Boot. He was interested in contemporary photographs, color prints, as well as older photographs such as turn of the century stereo cards and postcards. This is one of my favorite postcards from the early 20th century.
By his death in 1956, Kinsey had amassed approximately 20,000 photographs. The results of his efforts are eclectic but not, as they are often misinterpreted, unsystematic. He definitely had methods and reasons for collecting popular culture novelties, commercial images and objects, as well as fine art productions related to sexuality. Above all, the collection was meant to support and enhance the study of human sexuality. At the Institute, the arts were put into the service of science. Kinsey clearly felt that representation was a record or document of activity, as well as an indication of desire. The primary function of the erotica collection was to give the research team insight into what people thought and did in sexual practice. The researchers also looked to images and other forms of expressions for indication of interest, attitude, practice, techniques and anatomy.

Kinsey’s interest in entomology was in individual variation, which also interested him in terms of human anatomy. This is a photograph made by Dellenbach, the staff photographer, in 1950. They did a whole series of male and female pubic regions, as well as female breasts, comparing variation.

Paul Gephardt made a sworn statement for the federal court case, which provides another reason for collecting supplementary material while simultaneously explaining the extensive accumulation of materials devoted to particular activities. There are a lot of S & M photographs in the collection, and Paul Gephardt named that as one of the categories that weren’t widely documented in the interviews. That material was collected in order to provide or fill in the gaps.

Do you know what this image is? Do you recognize it? Right. This is the centerfold for the inaugural issue of Playboy in December 1953, and it is Marilyn Monroe. Kinsey felt that wide public distribution was really what made materials valuable to his investigation, and since aesthetic merit was not the measuring stick for an object’s value at the Institute, it didn’t matter if it was a copy or an original. This is a photograph that has been mounted onto card stock and filed along with all the other ones, although they have the complete run of Playboy upstairs. It came as a copy from that magazine and it was valuable to Kinsey.

This is a cowboy. There aren’t too many cowboys in the collection, but it is really meant to be representative and to show a few examples of the available materials. Therefore, some aspects of it are more extensive. However, unlike museum collections, the wealth of visual material at the Kinsey Institute was really not intended to function in the same capacity as images and objects on display for education and for the purpose of elevating and improving the public’s taste or their intellectual, moral and spiritual situations, the way art academies and societies had done in the past. In the 19th century, the art critic was the person who interpreted the works and made them understandable to the general public, and in a sense, Kinsey assumed this role. Since these works were never really on display for the public, he interpreted all of the data, which consisted of images as well as the interview information, and then presented the final results to the public.

Here’s a portrait of Dr. Carl Hartman who was head of biology at the University of Illinois and Kinsey on Kinsey’s back porch in 1951. The collections then, in addition to really augmenting Kinsey’s research, had another important function that I discovered in reading through the fascinating correspondence in the archive. That is that Kinsey gave tours to people who would come to visit. Esteemed visitors or potential financial supporters really delighted in sharing the collections with his visitors. Kinsey routinely kept them at the Institute until the wee hours of the morning explaining the research, their current findings, and also showing them objects from the collection. This practice suggests to me that the collection played a role in securing future support for the Institute. He probably shared the collections not only because he was proud of them, but also in order to create an intimate, though professional bond with colleagues. Granting access to this collection, which wasn’t really secret but was certainly a closed collection, made highly esteemed guests feel privileged and a lot of people wrote about it and thanked Kinsey for personally spending so much time with them. The collection would have impressed upon visitors how vast the field of human sexuality was, how valuable these materials were, and most importantly, how important Kinsey’s research was.

Here’s a portrait of Kinsey by Arnold Newman that was made in 1948. The collection of erotic material, like the gall wasps then, served to enhance the scientist’s self-assuredness and credibility. For Kinsey, a large collection also meant a vast resource of information that would enable him to make reliable statements and well-supported conclusions. Importantly then, the archive contributed to his position of authority, and bolstered his credentials during his lifetime. It also gave prestige to the Institute and enhanced the reputation of Indiana University, and was prominent in securing support for the Institute.

Here’s a more recent staff picture. This is an older one from 1998. I’m still in it. The Institute’s mission today is to promote the interdisciplinary research on human sexuality, gender and reproduction. The Institute fulfills this mission through its research projects, publications, and maintenance of special collections for scholarly use. While the scientific aspect of the research at the Institute claims most of its limited resources, scholars from around the globe come to Bloomington, Indiana to use the unique archive of materials at the Kinsey Institute. It really was a privilege to be the curator there for 5 years.

This is Morrison Hall, the building the Institute is in, and the reception area. So it occupies a very small space on a very large campus. It’s totally modest in its physical presence on campus--you don’t even know what’s in the building.

The purpose of the collection to date is not really as well defined as it was when Kinsey was the director. There’s also an incredible divide between the collection and the Institute’s scientific projects, but it is still a rich source of imagery for a wide range of research topics in the humanities. Today, the collection has approximately 75,000 photographs, and encompasses a wealth of photographic prints, negatives, slides and transparencies, besides more unusual formats like stanhopes, which are really tiny cylindrical glass tubes to which a microscopic image has been cemented to one end. That way a person can hold it up to the light and see a little nudie picture. Wealthy gentlemen used to put them in their letter-handle openers, and other objects.
The photographs, like I said, were produced by either commercial and fine art professionals or amateur photographers, which makes the collection really unusual. They date from the 1880s to the 1990s, but the vast majority of the pieces in the collection are from the 1940s and 50s, which really makes sense since that was the time and place that Kinsey was working in. So, although there are representations from many different countries, the photograph collection as well as the object collection, is primarily American.

Most of the photographs are also by unidentified artists. This is the archive today, and I just love it because I did all the conservation and so when I see that I just really have a lot of feelings. It’s incredible. It’s just a room full of boxes with these remarkable labels, and if we have time I can tell you about that. The Institute has a remarkable collection of photographs by George Plant Lyons who was really known in his day for his dance photographs and his portraits of the avant-garde literary circle in New York during the 1940s and early 1950s, though today he’s really most praised for his photographs of male nudes. The Institute has about 600 prints and 1,732 vintage 4x5 negatives that I put in the deep freezer with the help of a conservationist. But since I had to share it with the scientists at the Institute, they kept their blood samples on the bottom.

The Institute also has a large holding of photographs by the Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a German baron who moved to Sicily at the turn of the last century. He photographed the island youths in classical poses and settings, and is also well known in the history of photography for his images of male nudes. Some of the works by other known photographers in the collection include Lehnert & Landrock, Andre Dudien, Clarence John Laughlin, who is known as a surrealist photographer, Al Urban, who was a physical culture photographer in the 50s, and there are also a few photographs by Judy Dare. There are very few images by female artists in the collection that we know of. We also have a print by Wes Crimms, which I don’t have a slide for, and there’s one Joel-Peter Witkin in the collection. This is Portrait of Man from 1984.

This is one of my favorite photographs in the collection, and we used it for the anniversary exhibition in celebration of the Institute’s 50th anniversary in 1997. It was the first comprehensive survey of the collection on exhibit, and it was received very well for the most part, but we did have some trouble with the catalog. A lot has been written on obscenity and sexuality in museum and collection photography. I’ve conducted an in-depth examination of the photographic archive at the Kinsey Institute in order to bring together and contribute to some of these discussions by focusing on the subject of sexually explicit photography. Although my research on the Kinsey Institute’s photographic archive has primarily sought to eliminate the radical transformation of meaning that can occur based on location and context, today I’ll be comparing reactions from the 1950s to some contemporary responses to the same images. As I mentioned in my introduction, the strongest and easiest reaction to measure is censorship. I became familiar with Kinsey’s struggle for academic freedom and the legal battle that he faced in trying to preserve the right to collect materials related to his research. Because everybody at the Institute used to talk about “the landmark case,” and “31 photographs,” my interest in photography prompted me to find all those photographs that were intermingled in different categories and all of those boxes. It’s always been recognized at the Institute that that case really made it possible for Kinsey to accumulate a collection. So that really sparked my interest in the case. But I also have experienced censorship first hand on several occasions. The printer didn’t want to print the catalog, and then the binder didn’t want to bind the catalog, and that was in Indianapolis, which came as quite a surprise. We got the catalogs the morning of the opening for the show. I was also surprised at the exhibition when at the last minute, there were some administrators who came in to preview the show, even though they had already approved the selections, and ended up editing out four photographs. This is one of them. This is another one. Both are from the 19th century. I think that the historical case of “31 photographs,” as well as my recent experience, really makes us pause to think about how the action of censorship is similar, even across the span of 50 years.

Here’s another image from the documentary collection, which makes up a major portion of the photographs at the Institute. Kinsey really felt that it was essential to acquire erotic expression from a variety of cultures in order to understand sexual attitudes and behavior in the United States. He felt that comparing cultural expressions really helped to crystallize what was uniquely American, and he was particularly interested in Japanese erotica. This is a photograph produced in Japan around the Second World War.

He and his team believed that cultural conditioning affected sexual behavior, so that was another reason he felt it necessary to have materials from outside of the United States. Despite the importance of these cross-cultural materials, the first of many shipments was seized by a custom collector in Indianapolis in 1947 for being in violation of the tariff act of 1930 which states, “All persons are prohibited from importing into the United States from any foreign country any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation figure or image which is obscene or immoral.” A federal law made the importation of obscene material a felony in 1948.

This is Harriet Pilpel. She became Kinsey’s lead attorney when the case really heated up. Three years before the first seizure in 1947. He first approached Morris Ernst who was known in censorship law for having defended James Joyce’s Ulysses. Pilpel was a junior attorney at his firm in New York but became his lead attorney later on. An informal agreement was negotiated with the Indianapolis customs, and materials were able to pass through customs to the Institute for sex research, uninterrupted for the next three years. Kinsey was always concerned that he didn’t have some sort of letter from a government official really granting him the right to do that. He was very aware that the situation was tenuous at best, and what he feared most happened in 1950. The customs collector who understood his research project and who had agreed to let items pass was on vacation. The new assistant was in the office and saw a box addressed to Dr. Kinsey at the Sex Institute. When he opened it up he was so horrified at what he saw that he called the media. Kinsey was really upset about that because he said he would never show those to journalists or to people outside of the scientific sphere. That was not his intended use of the materials. It got to be really ugly. A lot of people got involved and the governor called Herman Wells, the President of Indiana University but Wells hung up on him and defended Kinsey until the very end. He was always in support of Kinsey’s right to have whatever materials he needed to conduct his research. So things really got bad in 1950 and after that time Kinsey employed Pilpel to try to work things out. It became obvious to him by December of 1950 that that wasn’t going to happen, that it wasn’t going to be settled out of court. It took another six years for things to get underway. I wanted to read this excerpt from correspondence that Kinsey wrote: “It’s the usual story of a new clerk in the Indianapolis customs office being surprised at the sort of material which has never been seen before and starting difficulty.” There is further complication in the fact that the acting commissioner at Washington would like to make the court take the responsibility for interpreting the law, instead of himself.” So the government stalled for six years from 1950 until 1956. They refused to make a decision about whether or not Kinsey could have the right to import those kinds of materials or not. Because they stalled in making the decision, they couldn’t take it to court to get the matter settled. So it wasn’t until February 1956 that the customs bureau in Washington refused Kinsey the right to import these materials. I’m showing this because this is dated 1945 and is the sort of amateur material that would have been going through customs, though this is a U.S. piece so it didn’t have to pass through customs. It wasn’t until August 1 of 1956 that the U.S. Attorney filed libel. Kinsey died just a few weeks later, so he did not live to see the resolution of the case, but on October 31, 1957, which was over a year after his death, a judge in New York ruled in favor of the Sex Institute. So Kinsey had his importations routed through a customs broker house in New York so that the case could be heard here instead of Indiana, which was a really smart move. The government accepted the decision on January 2, 1958, so that was a long, drawn-out battle.

This is a print called Cunt Hell of Great Searing Heat, and it dates from early to mid 19th century. I’m about to start showing you images from the court case called “31 photographs.” I’m really interested in what your thoughts are on those photographs. Why do you think they’re still offensive today, considering that they have recently been censored? Why are they objectionable now, half a century later?

Anyhow, this is a Japanese print. The material that was under judicial review included eight books, 46 prints and drawings, six paintings, nine 3-dimensional objects, printed matter, and photographs. Among them were Asian prints and paintings of explicit heterosexual intercourse, the written memoirs of the Marquis de Sade, and a portfolio of engravings depicting bestiality. Thirty-one sexually explicit photographs that were imported from Denmark in 1951 became the foundation of the case. This is the first image from the series, and it’s really an anomaly--none of the others are quite like this one. The court case was known as U.S. vs. 31 Photographs, or simply as 31 Photographs. These black and white photographs were chosen to be the center of the case because they were considered to be the most openly erotic works in the test case. If Pilpel could convince the judge that Kinsey had a legitimate scientific use for these photographs, it would make any equally explicit and other more subtle forms of erotica permissible. So just what do these offensive pictures depict? Besides that anomaly, they show a variety of coital positions that deviate from the standard missionary position. Here are a few of those: Cunnilingus. Fellatio. So-called lesbian activity. Masturbation. Exposed genitalia (I love that picture). And group sex. Not only did the customs collector who seized them label the photographs as “blatant obscenity”, but they were also presented as the most openly erotic material seen in a court of law in 1957. In this other District Court of New York, the legal term “obscenity” fell away and rendered the photographs and all of the other materials in question permissible. However, the entrance of 31 photographs into the domains of law and science somewhat obscured their original function as cultural commodities, even though that’s what they were--they were produced for the purpose of selling. That’s how Kinsey was able to obtain these and other sexually explicit materials from businesses overseas. Kinsey decided to purchase materials from foreign book dealers for the test case so he ordered some materials, including the 31 photographs from a reputable Danish bookstore. In spite of the fact that the photographs were produced in Europe, probably in the early 1940s and perhaps for soldiers, importation brought at least one set of them into the Cold War period of the United States. Therefore, it’s important to consider what these images may have meant or conveyed to those who viewed them in the 1950s.

Now we go back to the idea of photography as being truth and functioning as evidence, so it’s hard to get away from that, but perhaps that’s one of the reasons that they seemed initially objectionable. Maybe the knee-jerk reaction came from the realization that these sorts of things happened and were of interest to people. Never mind the poor quality of the images, and the fact that the sexual action or areas of erotic interest are really obscured by the poor quality of the prints. They were probably intended for a heterosexual male audience, but such images clearly did not appeal to this target group unilaterally. Strubinger, the customs representative from Washington, who refused to grant sanction, saw these examples of confiscated materials in April of 1950 and described them as grossly obscene. So I wonder, why did they appall the customs collector? Why did they appall some of the target group? Were they offensive because they threatened to corrupt viewers? Was it the gritty quality of the poorly printed negatives that intensified the dirtiness of the photographs? Or was the real threat the evidence that such activity occurred? Of course, all of these are possibilities, but I think that the relationship between photography, reality and documentation emerges forcefully here. Understood as evidence, they incriminated everybody involved. It’s also important to realize or acknowledge that they were definitely staged for the camera. I think that’s really most clear in the images that are supposed to depict lesbian activity. It’s really a constructed framework of production and it’s most visible in the images of the two women, especially given their physical relationship to the camera versus their physical relationship to each other. The relationship to the camera and the visibility of their genitalia takes precedent over what might otherwise be an intimate relationship with each other. In all likelihood this perception of images being documents of real events would have probably been sufficient for some viewers to proclaim the images offensive. On a deeper, cultural level, however, in the context of post-war America during the 1950s, communism and homosexuality were conflated often and regarded as un-American. Fears of both were generated by their invisibility and potential threat to the nation. In this group of images, there are staged scenes of female homosexuality. I think that it is probably really less threatening than images like this, however. I think the matter of visibility becomes really important in looking at these. If you look at the whole series of 31 Photographs, it becomes very clear, very quickly that the person who’s not visible is the man. And in post-WWII America, that was really difficult. Men came home from the war and they joined the rat race. Wilson Sloan wrote a book about it called The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Anonymity and blending in was problematic for American men in post-war America. However, anonymity in a sexual scenario has a lot of advantages and benefits. Male viewers could easily slip into the role of the man. Making the model unidentifiable probably provided the really practical function of protection, but it also conveys the message that it’s possible to have pleasure without commitment or responsibility. On the other hand, the women are very visible in other ways. Not only are their sites of potential sexual stimulation like their hands, their genitals, and their mouths visible, but also their faces are visible; they’re smiling, and I think that that’s probably more problematic. After the conclusion of WWII, a woman’s great visibility in a man’s world of employment and commerce really became a threat to the traditional patriarchy and social structure of the United States. In society, women were being squeezed out of the workforce and being made less visible, but here in the photographs, the women are visible, and the positive message here I think is that they seem to be enjoying the sexual experience, even though, of course, it is staged. That is conveyed as a message--there’s a sense of fun. So in addition to the realistic medium of photography is the graphic depiction of a variety of sexual activities, many of which were illegal. Fornication was illegal in 39 states and adultery was only legal in five. Therefore, a lot of these were depicting illegal actions. I think that the indication of female sexual pleasure was ultimately the most disturbing and offensive aspects to some viewers during the 1950s. Probably the unprofessional quality of the images also contributed to their rejection, since they couldn’t be rescued on aesthetic grounds. They also suggested that anybody could buy or make or star in dirty pictures.
Now I’m going to tell you a little bit about my experiences with censorship in this collection. In 1998 I was invited to give a presentation to a panel of lawyers, it was very exciting. Lewis Curkin, who defended Robert Mapplethorpe, was there, and Marjorie Hinds from the ACLU was there. The issue at hand was censorship so they invited me to come and talk about the Institute’s case. There was a book published after that conference was completed, and it’s called Porn 101. It’s really fun to have on your resume. So they included my essay in here, and the coordinator of the conference, James Elias, who is also the director of the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge, really wanted to have images from the 31 Photographs in the book and I did too, but the publisher pulled out and wouldn’t print them. This is the only one they said they would print. I’m going to read to you excerpts from some of the emails I was cc’d on. This is between Eugene O’Connor, the contact at Prometheus, who was the publisher of Porn 101, and James Elias, who was the editor of the volume, the coordinator of the conference, and the director of another sex institute. This is the publisher: “To answer your question about which specific photos are too graphic, all of the Kinsey photos, except the first of the women seated on something, dressed in her underwear.” Linda Williams was also censored and the photographs were targeted, so if you look at the images in here, I don’t think there are any photographs--that was the medium that got axed. James wrote back and said, “I’m sorry about Prometheus’ stance on the pictures. The Kinsey article with pictures from the 1940s would not be a problem if we reduced them in size and put six of them to a page [simply reducing the size and limiting the number]. If not, then I’ll have Jennifer review her text without the pictures, but they do add a great deal. Please reconsider your position.” He wrote back the next day and said, “We hold by these deletions that I suggested that you make to the Kinsey photos and Linda Williams’ chapters in my email from the 13th of April. If the author’s can go with the deletions, fine, but if not we’ll have to consider dropping the chapters. Since we’re marketing this as both an academic and a trade book, to include these pictures would seriously curtail sales. Sorry, but the order doesn’t come from me. Do you know of alternative photographs for the Kinsey article that could be substituted for the more graphic ones? It’s the sex acts, real or simulated, that our people are objecting to here.”

So here we are again, 50 years later, and these images are still being censored after laying the foundation for Kinsey’s academic freedom. Why? The publisher really stated that it was the graphic representation of sexual acts whether real or simulated, which I argued might have been cause for a negative response in the 1950s but people really are savvy now. I think about photography and the fact that there’s a performance element, but the real or simulated sex acts made it objectionable because it might affect sales. So despite the recognition that there is performance in front of the camera, these are deemed unsuitable because they might affect the publisher’s relationship with vendors. I think it’s funny, too, because they were produced to be commodities--that’s why Kinsey was able to acquire them. But here in the 1990s they’re not seen as marketable, they’re not seen as an asset as James Elias argued that they were. The director of the Institute was also very concerned when I shared with him the abstract for my presentation for the World Pornography Conference, where I was going to show the 31 Photographs. This is, of course, due to the turbulent political climate, and the culture-wars, of course, as well as the constant political attacks on the Kinsey Institute, so I understand the director’s reservation about my showing those photographs. I’m a little more surprised about Prometheus, which has really a liberal reputation, and they’re decision not to publish these images. To me, they appear totally out of date, and I think the hairstyles and garter belts and pumps are really kind of interesting in what they’re doing. But it’s also not that interesting because with age, the transparency of performance becomes a lot more visible, and I think oftentimes humorous. So I ask again, why, a half a century later are these pictures objectionable? I’m interested in your thoughts, but here are some of mine. With the culture wars of the early 1990s, photography came under attack and with the Mapplethorpe case even museum directors became culpable for the works shown in their institutions. Not only were the NEA and NEH budgets drastically reduced as a result of challenging work by photographers, but also existing funding opportunities contained obscenity clauses, restricting artists from doing work with federal grants that might be considered obscene. Philip-Lorca diCorcia had to sign an obscenity clause when he did his work on male prostitution, which I thought was really funny because he pushed the envelope a little bit there, with his choice of subject matter, although the images are not explicit in any way. It’s ironic, and there are lots of cultural contradictions, which make cultural studies so interesting, because in this conservative climate, we also have the Clinton and Lewinsky scandal, we have media that continues to splatter celebrity and politician infidelities and break-ups as entertainment or news. The porn industry has really flourished: they produce videos, there are X-rated pay channels that are available through cable companies, and then internet arrived on the scene, complete with chat rooms and cyber-sex. Boogie Nights came out as a popular film about the porn industry as Hollywood entertainment intended for mass consumption. Even at the end of the decade, even at the end of the 1990s, it was still a problem to show genitals and sexual activity, particularly through the photographic medium. One of the only conclusions that I can really come to is that part of the problem must be the enduring nature of books. Once it’s printed, it’s there. In terms of what can be seen in the images and the sexual activity depicted, I think it’s interesting to just compare an image like this to what’s visible in Hustler and Playboy and on the news stands anywhere. So I don’t find them as realistic or shocking as maybe similar contemporary images. So I’m wondering, what nerve do they hit in today’s viewer? Is there something deeper than the concern for the marketability of a book? Is there something more than the public perception of a well-established scientific institute?

I just wanted to show you a few more photographs from the collection, since I knew you’d be sad that I didn’t show very many. So here are some of my favorites. I think this one should have been the cover for the book, Peek. It is indeed one of my favorite photographs. My dissertation is titled, Sex in the Fields, so I thought this would make a really nice cover picture for that. I grew up in Wisconsin so I know. I really think this image is really interesting and very unusual because there’s direct eye contact with the man and his age. I think it’s really interesting. It’s definitely an amateur photograph, and the models are in many other photographs in the collection. I love this photograph. This one got censored at one point too because although it seems to really create a sense of intimacy between the two models, they’re gazing directly toward each other, even though, of course, the genitals are on view for us. I love this photograph and selected this as one of my favorite images to be in an exhibition. It was done in the 1920s so I think it’s really brave considering it’s the age of the Twiggy flapper, for this woman to stand so boldly and beautifully. This one just kind of cracks me up. This is also from the 1920s. It could definitely be classified as an amateur photograph. This is an older one, but I think quite beautiful, against the starry, starry sky in the studio. This is really nice because it’s an interesting twist on the narcissist myth. This is another personal favorite. It’s a collage, so somebody took the time to find these images and put them together. There’s also one of butts. This photograph was done in the 1940s and looks to me like a prelude to Mapplethorpe’s Man in the Polyester Suit. This is just a beautiful little hand-carved print. This is a very small print, as a photograph, as a print, as an aesthetic object, it’s beautiful. So I think it really might have been done by George Platlines, but it wasn’t identified as one of his photographs. So there’s one more. It’s a group picture of transvestites, and this, too, I think, has the element of fun that I’m really fascinated by in images from the collection.

So, one of my questions is: Is fun still a problem?

Okay, well, that’s it.

(Applause)

I’d really like to hear some of your thoughts. What are your reactions to the 31 Photographs? I brought some publications that I did and Cheryl showed you this one. This is a small exhibition on the subject of The Kiss that we did. And this is the exhibition catalog from The Art of Desire, the 50th anniversary exhibition. I’ve got the Porn 101, but they made so many mistakes in editing it. This is my dissertation after UMI shrunk it. I’ll pass this around while we’re talking. I’ll be here all day today, so these can float about, but they must come home with me.

Does anybody have any questions? I’m really interested in your reactions here.Audience: I have a quick comment first, and then a question. The whole issue you talked about with the Porn 101 book is kind of absolutely amazing because the whole idea of preventing the publishing of it so that I don’t have access to it is absurd because I can get it from my computer--I can walk out of this building and have something 50 times as intense within a few blocks. I’m wondering how you guys dealt with being censored, and how you justified or allowed yourself to go through with it, and why maybe you didn’t say, “You know? If you don’t want to publish this in the form that it works and that I intend, then I’d just as soon shelve it.” I know once you’re three years into a project you just want to follow through with it, but talk a little bit about how you justified for yourself and the other people in the project about not saying, “Okay, forget it then.”

Pearson Yamashiro: Sure, the question is, why did I decide to publish my article in Porn 101 after the images were pulled. Linda Williams decided not to, so that was definitely a choice that I had. I felt like, after reading the essay again, that it could stand on its own. It’s more interesting with the images, but I just put a clause in there saying if you want to obtain these, contact the Institute, this is the address, this is where you can get them since it was not possible to publish them at this point. The Institute considers 31 Photographs to be a landmark case. Most people don’t--most people don’t know about it. That was my big incentive in including it in the book, because it is an important historical case that did defend academic freedom. So, as the cultural climate is the way it is today, I think it’s important to have that legal precedent, and I think that the case is important enough that I wanted it to be part of the book.

Audience: First of all let me say that I saw the Kissing Show. Did you curate that?

Pearson Yamashiro: Yes.

Audience: Okay. I enjoyed it so much, and it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. It was much more tame, for the most part, and there were a few anomalies that were a little more edgy or racy. But I was wondering whether or not you’re interested in collecting anything that deals more with a sublimated, codified expression of sexuality.
Pearson Yamashiro: Kinsey was interested in just everything and anything, and you look at some of those photographs and think, “How did that wind up here and why is this of sexual interest?” There’s one and I wish I’d brought it now, of a woman bowling in a skirt, and I’m thinking, “Why?” So there’s definitely been interest in more subtle forms of expression, and as I mentioned, the female figure category is enormous and there are lots of pictures of clothed women. So it’s all over the place and people often ask me too, based on the Institute’s collection, “can you see a progression of degree of explicitness as time goes on?” The answer to that is, no. Really, from as soon as photography was applicable to the human form, they’re doing all kinds of things. The Institute is interested in collecting a variety of materials. The acquisition funds are really small, actually the library is the only part of the collection that has any funds for acquisitions, and they basically buy materials to support the current scientific research that’s going on. All of their acquisitions currently come through donations. So it’s just who you meet and what you can get.

Like when I left, someone gave us a Beanie Baby whose name was Naughty, and baseball hats with things on them. My favorite thing in the collection, which is in The Art of Desire, is the fancy condom collection from the 1940s and 1950s. Paul Gephardt noticed that they were deteriorating and contacted one of his friends in the Chemistry Department who knew all about preserving latex, because the military also used latex and gave them advise on how to preserve latex rubber. They customized test tubes and filled them with an inert gas and sealed them. I’m happy to tell you that the condom collection is intact. When I put it in the gallery I thought the director was going to have a heart attack. Any other questions?

Audience: During the bulk of the collecting that was going on in the 40s and 50s, was there ever any collecting of any African-American figures and bodies?

Pearson Yamashiro: Definitely. Kinsey was interested in whatever he could get his hands on, so he certainly was interested in different cultural groups and races. But there’s a really problematic issue with race in the collection. The Institute does have sculptures from Africa that are beautiful and a lot of materials, more really from Asia than from Africa, but there are some, in the photography collection. I mentioned that there’s a portion called The Documentary Collection, and Paul Gephardt, John Bancroft, the current director and I named that collection The Documentary Collection on February 3, 1997 to sort of reference its original function for the research, which was to represent activity and convey that to the scientists. It has an incredible and elaborate system of classification, and it’s very problematic because, well, some materials from abroad are in separate categories. Anthropology is one that I showed from WWII Japan with the little vignette. The close-up is in a category called Anthropology Japan. There’s also Anthropology Africa and Anthropology Thailand, so a variety of those materials are there. I think that a lot of the time they didn’t know if the material was American or not so they just assumed that it was American. The only point, the only time that race, other than the in the culture or anthropology sections, is singled out is in the “genitalia/male/ Negro” category. That’s the only separate category for race that doesn’t have to do with cultural or national identity. It’s disturbing that it was singled out, and I’m not sure why it was. I did write about that in my dissertation, but I can only really guess why that would have been interesting as a group by itself maybe because they had comparable categories, and it’s really hard to tell, if it’s a close-up of genitalia, what the race is sometimes. A lot of times it’s difficult to tell. So I think they’re making a lot of assumptions, and I think it’s interesting that it was a category of interest to them in and of itself. I’m not sure why it was, but I find it really problematic. Do you have a follow-up question? No? Well, if that’s upsetting to you, you have to consider the time and the historical context. We call it the historical integrity of the archives, so we haven’t changed the wording. Of course “Negro” is not a word that’s used currently and is not acceptable anymore, but we’ve left that intact because that was terminology that Kinsey used and that was the historical construction of the archive. It is in the shape that Kinsey intended it to be in.

Audience: It’s not really upsetting, it’s just understandable considering the time and date, but I’m sitting here in 2002 and I still don’t see anything from your presentation on the African-American figure, male or female.

Pearson Yamashiro: That’s a good point. The presentation really was meant to be about the 31 Photographs, although I wanted to include some others, and had points to make about Kinsey’s interest in ancient erotica and Asian erotica, which is why I showed some figures from that. I guess maybe why I didn’t include some of the pictures that depict interracial sex or focus on non-whites is because I’m still kind of grappling with what Kinsey thought about that. So that is my project, really, to understand what Kinsey was doing and to understand the purpose of this archive initially. It’s a point well taken.

Audience: I can only imagine what he thought in the 40s and 50s, but you know . . .

Pearson Yamashiro: All of the researchers had to be white men because anybody could talk to white men. He didn’t want women because women could only talk to other women. So all of the researchers were white guys with doctorate degrees. Any more questions?

Audience: I was going to make a quick comment, perhaps put in my two cents about the 31 Photographs. Certainly, just from the visual perspective, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen more. I wouldn’t describe them as erotic in any way. I won’t need a newspaper to walk out of here. (Laughter) The folks outside of New York need a few minutes for that to settle in. Although some of them are graphic and you could easily understand why they would offend people.

Pearson Yamashiro: You can?

Audience: Yeah, I think their resistance to publication may have more to do with a sort of the sign of the times. I think you gave some really good answers, such as the whole attack on photography starting in the mid-80s and going right through the 90s and then the Monica Lewinsky issue which we spent billions of dollars to investigate, the rise of the moral right, correcting behavior, and the concerns that certain individuals have over women being in a position of initiating or being gratified by sex, that we still want to perceive women as just this baby vessel. When they step out of that mold we get uncomfortable, and of course we’re very uncomfortable with anything that’s homoerotic because it cuts to the core of our own sexuality and our discomfort with our own sexuality and its permanence. I think you pretty much articulated those. The question I had, which came about towards the end of the slide presentation was about that beautiful photograph that you had of just of the male genitalia area. Is that included in the 31 Photographs?

Pearson Yamashiro: The small, hand-colored piece?

Audience: Yeah.

Pearson Yamashiro: No, that’s not part of it.

Audience: No? Okay, because I’m often amused by trying to figure out what the dividing line is between fine art and pornography. Some of the stuff that’s in Playboy is really beautiful, really beautiful photographs, but that’s considered pornographic material. Then there are things that you see like when I went to see the Mapplethorpe retrospective at the Whitney, I thought that was pornography, but it was very beautiful, just absolutely beautiful photographs, some of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen. So I’m trying to figure out if you know the dividing line between art and pornography. Also, could I just make a quick comment about women bowling in long dresses? There was a point at which just seeing a woman’s ankle was considered to be erotic. Downtown in the 23rd Street area by the flatiron building, a lot of men used to gather there in the 20s and 30s to watch the women go by and watch the wind sort of blow their skirts up a little bit so you could see an ankle.

Younger: That’s actually where 23 Skidoo came from. The cops would come along and say Skidoo-Skidoo!

Pearson Yamashiro: The bowling photograph is from the 1960s. She’s got on a plaid skirt, and it’s totally typical attire for the era, so you know, that’s true. So did you want me to answer the question?

Audience: Yeah, the dividing line between art and pornography.

Pearson Yamashiro: Actually that’s a question that I really tried to go past in my research in addressing other questions because I think that it largely does depend on personal perspectives. Although, I have to say going to the World Pornography Conference, and I should have told you this about that experience, a lot of events call themselves “interdisciplinary”--they might have someone from an English Department and Art History, (Laughter) but the World Pornography Conference was really interdisciplinary in the fact that there were academicians, legal experts and porn stars, and they were all on panels together so the publication really is interesting. I have always avoided using the word “pornography” when I was at the Institute; I never called the collections there “pornographic.” I might have occasionally called them “erotic” because the scientists also used that and Kinsey used that terminology. I guess I never liked the word “pornography” because I thought it automatically undercut any potential value, either cultural or aesthetic, of an image. So I purposely have not used that word, but go into the World Pornography Conference, and the people in the industry are really proud to call what they do “pornography.” It was a very interesting perspective. It’s not really an issue that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about because I’ve wanted to think about some other things instead. Being an art historian and being the curator at the Institute, I wasn’t really able to entertain the most obvious art historical avenues of thought like, who is the audience? Who is the maker? All of those are thwarted right away, so I had to think about other things. Who accumulated these images? Why did they arrange them in this way? What does that tell me about the researcher’s priorities, interests and ideologies?

Audience: I just wanted to go back to your question; do we have ideas about why the 31 Photographs are still censored? After my experience of living in the States now for three years I’m still in kind of in a culture shock about the general atmosphere having anything to do with sexuality in this country, which goes way beyond this. I think it starts so much earlier, like language for example. Censorship in this regard is like, I don’t know. I still haven’t really perceived how far this goes and how deep this is, and how much more uptight anything around sexuality and eroticism and body is here than in Europe. It’s a huge discrepancy, and I am still trying to digest it. So for me this comes not as a surprise at all. It totally fits into my image of the U.S.

Pearson Yamashiro: I guess. It’s just so disappointing to me. I know that they’re graphic images, but I still have such a hard time coming to terms with why they’re so offensive. I don’t know.

Audience: We just had a case in our school of two ten-year-old boys writing the words “vagina,” “penis,” and “fuck” on a blackboard, and that was handled like an act of, I don’t know, like they were trying to burn down the school or something like that. If that’s shocking, if that’s truly shocking, then those images are definitely very shocking.

Pearson Yamashiro: Anybody else? Please remember, too, that I’ve done six or seven years of research on this collection and I just have an hour here to just show you a little bit and tell you just a little bit about some of the things that I’ve thought of, so you’re only getting a glimpse.

Audience: Just a comment about the censorship issues which seem to reflect more than anything about representations of sexuality, the demarcation of where the end of mainstream exists and where the subculture or the psyche exists. Your analogy of the pride around which the pornographic industry takes in its own activities is really interesting because I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the mainstreamization, for lack of a less awkward word, was to happen around sexuality or around drug use. For instance, what would happen to those industries if there would be less of a desire to consume them, if it was in a sense, more normal in practice and in propagation? There’s certainly a desire that comes out of its illicitness, and in many ways there’s kind of an analogy around the distinction, the very subtle and subjective distinctions around the public and private. I was wondering if you had any comments about any of those ideas.

Pearson Yamashiro: I completely agree with what you’re saying in terms of the illicitness or the lack of accessibility kind of heightening the erotic value or the cultural value of images. I really found too that when I was the Institute’s curator, having classes or visitors come, there was a sense of “we are in the Kinsey Institute.” Having people in the conference room there was definitely a sense of privileged access to closed materials. I can understand what you’re saying, I don’t know if I have any more comments about it than that. Do you have a question though that I’m not answering? No? Okay.

Audience: I was interested in where the boundary lies since it’s so slippery.

Pearson Yamashiro: It is slippery.

Audience: What is erotic? What is sensual? What is sexual? What is confounding? Like that bowling picture; I’m trying to imagine that too. I’m thinking, “Okay, who was this made for? Who found this interesting and what else did that person find interesting that doesn’t turn me on?” There’s that kind of subjectivity around desire that’s very particular. For example, the stereotypical nape of the neck, which is supposedly a cultural thing.

Pearson Yamashiro: Yeah, you’re right, and I think that the Institute’s collection of photographs was so interesting because there was a secondary location. A new boundary. Now they’re part of the Institute’s collection, which gives them importance and scientific importance beyond being cultural commodities. Once they enter the Institute they’re important on a different level and I think that that really imbues them with a greater value, even though some of the images are not good.

Younger: I’m also curious about the timing. Like the 20s seems to be a very sexual age, and then you get to the 60s and it’s incredibly free sex and now it’s all closed down again. It’s so weird to me how this culture goes.

Pearson Yamashiro: I think every era is full of contradictions and we think of the 1950s as being very wholesome and the Leave it to Beaver kind of image, but there was a lot of stuff going on. The 60s didn’t just come from nowhere--they came out of the 50s. I think there are a lot of contradictions and that’s why I’m just grappling with the idea that sex is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere now. It’s so available in all kinds of mediated fashions, even though some things are still considered taboo.

Audience: I’m curious too, because we’re going to be talking about projections of sexuality on children. Was there a lot of sexuality of children in the collection?

Pearson Yamashiro: Not a lot, no, although there were some images of children. I always really hate to talk about this because it’s slippery ground for the Institute. The 31 Photographs case did make it possible for the Institute to accumulate and amass a collection, but images of children are not protected by law, so it’s something that they’re not really supposed to have. There aren’t that many photographs of children, and most of them are from the Victorian age. The concept of childhood was really much different then, so I think that that helps me deal with the fact that those images exist, but a lot of people want to study images of children because images are so important as touchstones in our culture. A lot of people would call the Institute and want to see them but while I was there I couldn’t even show people the Victorian images. No. Just because of the cultural climate and the fact that those are not protected by the federal obscenity case that the Institute won. It could open up, just, whew! It could lead to a destruction of the collection.

Audience: That wasn’t part of the deal essentially?

Pearson Yamashiro: Right. They are not protected by law.

Younger: I think that you need to understand too, that Jennifer really likes the Center and doesn’t want to see it destroyed, and the way you get it destroyed is if you get too much publicity at some point too.

Pearson Yamashiro: But the Institute has always gotten lots of attention because of Kinsey’s research. Like, there is a conservative group, and one woman in particular who’s life mission is to defame Alfred Kinsey and his research because he used data from a pedophile in his volumes. He reported on what he could gather from that information about childhood sexuality, and people now are just going crazy. They just are going crazy about that. So the Institute is constantly under political attacks. The day that The Art of Desire exhibition opened, the Conservative Women for America came and demonstrated on the square in Bloomington, but we were really happy that they didn’t come to the show.

Audience: I was wondering, because I sort of have the same confusion that you have in the sense that it’s always been this pet hobby of mine more on the literary end in terms of, like, one day a good friend of mine leant me this book and it was 19th century, Victorian erotica, and I was like, “Oh my God! They were doing that in the Victoria era when you weren’t supposed to shake hands?” And from that I sort of kept wondering what else is suppressed or what other underworlds are going on. People are putting on this facade on the outside, but on the inside there’s all this activity going on. I guess it’s like grandma or mom having sex--you don’t want to think about that, right? We have this idea of what people did in the past and it was a much more pure era, so I guess maybe now we still have that hang-up in some sort of general way. We don’t want to let go of that fact that our parents made out in cars or hung out in the fields. So I guess I put it in that sort of category, because I like read stuff and think, “These are the people who couldn’t show an ankle or hold hands without scandalizing the family.” Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters and cousins and everybody are having a good ol’ time in the mansion. So I guess I’ve never seen any imagery from that period because I kept to the literary side, but seeing this and hearing people’s reactions, it still seems like it’s that same kind of current that’s going on.

Pearson Yamashiro: Yeah, you’re right, and I hadn’t really thought about that, because usually the older the material is the more acceptable for viewing it becomes. But I kind of think too in terms of what’s happening today with the military’s policy, of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Go ahead and do it, but I don’t want to hear about it, and I certainly don’t want to see it. So I think too that there is a real difference between knowing and seeing, and that people might be able to handle the knowledge, but they can’t handle seeing it.

Audience: Like the difference between allowing the writing in the book but not the images.

Pearson Yamashiro: Sure. Yeah, sure. That is definitely part of it. It has to be. This book came out in September of 2000 and my daughter was four months old then. I went to a family reunion and I took my new baby and I took my book and had the best time. I had all my cousins blush, so it really is an amazing collection and I really enjoyed the experience and I hope that you enjoyed hearing about it today. I know that you have to analyze things for the proceedings, but having a critical perspective doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a negative one. I just want to say that for all of the articles that you’re going to write, I really think that it’s hard to make a fair assessment and find what was good and maybe what was missing, but if your whole analysis is on what the person didn’t say, it’s not really fair.

Audience: I have a question. Throughout the reading that we had to do before today, everything was based on the collection itself but I didn’t read Kinsey’s books yet.

Pearson Yamashiro: You probably never will. Most people have never actually read them.

Audience: There is something that I want to actually ask. How important was his research as compared to the importance of the collection itself?

Pearson Yamashiro: His research was primary. That was his number one goal and he saw the interviews as the main way to obtain material for his research. The collections were completely secondary, and that structure still exists at the Institute today. The scientific research is really what is primary and the collection is secondary.

Audience: The question that I want to ask is, do you think that the collection helped you more in whatever you’re doing in art or even in science than what he wrote about in his own books. Was the collection more important--is it more important now than the book, or are the books as important?

Pearson Yamashiro: That’s a really good question. How Kinsey interpreted and viewed visual images is not well documented. I found one memo in a room full of correspondence about the significance of erotic art in literature that I’m sure was written by him, but it wasn’t even initialed or signed. We have to be creative in thinking about that how he used that collection because he very rarely actually wrote about it. I found a few pieces of correspondence in which the female prison material is compared to the male prison material. Like, this is what the men focused on while this is what the women focused on, so he did make some comparisons, but when he did write generally or talk generally about art, it’s very clear that it reinforced his thinking. I think really that this collection is so unusual and so amazing because of the range of material in date, media, and subject matter. It’s unique in the world and I think it’s going to be very important for scholars now. So while it confirmed his thinking, it’s going to really help us in our thinking about different time periods and expressions. So I do think it’s probably more important now than what he regarded.

Audience: I just have a quick question but I don’t really know how to ask it. You seem very comfortable with all of this material, but that issue of pedophilia really, obviously, set you aback. Are there other parts of the collection that you’re uncomfortable with in some way? Because I think it’s interesting that you’re asking us to think about censorship, but at the same time you limit or feel uncomfortable showing those Victorian pieces.

Pearson Yamashiro: Well, not those. That is a good question because we all hate to be censored. Like when the director was concerned that I was going to show 31 Photographs at the World Pornography Conference. I mean come on, what else is going to be shown at the World Porn Conference. But I do understand where he’s coming from because he, too, wants to protect the Institute and the collection and he doesn’t want to see it get destroyed. I’m very much still an ambassador for the Kinsey Institute. I love the collection. I would hate to see any harm come to it.

Audience: Are there any parts of it that make you personally uncomfortable? Something that you would only admit to your husband.

Pearson Yamashiro: There are lots of parts of the collection that quite frankly I can’t relate to at all, but there’s really not much there that does offend me. The images of children are a concern because of the political repercussions. You brought up the other facet that I find very disturbing and that is the separation of the black men genitalia, specifically, whereas pictures of the Latino phallus, are intermingled in all the other categories. Why is that? I find that issue disturbing and challenging. I’ve done some thinking about it, but I need to do more. But nah, there’s really not too much there that bothers me. You have to take it with a grain of salt. To me, I find violence disturbing, and I mentioned that there was a large volume of S&M photographs, but a lot of that is staged, and for people who choose that lifestyle it’s pleasurable. I can’t relate to that but it doesn’t offend me.

Audience: I have a quick technical question. Is this Kinsey’s collection? There was four men who were all involved with the research, was it all of theirs too? Were there other people involved in collecting the visual data?

Pearson Yamashiro: Yes there were but Kinsey was clearly the leader of this team. Although, everybody helped and he made contacts worldwide. He had somebody at the Seattle Museum of Art, he had somebody in Kansas City, and he had all kinds of people in New York. He had private collectors, museum curators, artists, writers, he had all kinds of people who were traveling and looking for things and finding him things, so it was very much a team effort. Just like I told you, he collected over a million gall wasps, when in fact former students of his would be doing their field research and find wasps and send them to him. He didn’t have any trouble accepting other people’s data, whether it was bugs or, in the case of the pedophile, interview information. No one on his team conducted the interview but it was still accepted into his archive of data. Regardless, we still call it Kinsey’s collection. He started it, but it’s certainly continued to grow decade after his death with Paul Gephardt as director. So yes, they were all very much involved in accumulating materials.

Audience: I just want to applaud one thing that your work is generating, and that seems to be, if nothing else, dialogue. There’s this real underside, this seedy underside to prohibition in general. Just look at the Catholic priests and what’s happening there. If you’re promoting dialogue about issues which are considered to be taboo, that’s really the only way. I’m not suggesting that we get rid of any kind of prohibition, but by promoting dialogue you can actually somehow resolve some of the really harmful aspects that grow out of prohibition, which is the idea that you can do anything behind closed doors as long as you don’t talk about it or show it. So thank you.
Pearson Yamashiro: Well, you’re welcome. I think that’s why the Institute’s collection is so important. These images do exist; people do make them and people are going to continue to make them. What can we learn from them? And that is the question that I was trying to approach rather than addressing whether or not it is pornography or fine art. That can be a very interesting question and I appreciate your acknowledgement that in pornography there can be aesthetics, but that’s not my main interest. Thanks.

Audience: One last question. There have been other researchers that have done some groundbreaking studies. One that comes to mind it Shere Hite and the Hite report. Has any of that been incorporated into the Kinsey collection?

Pearson Yamashiro: Not that I know of. I’m not familiar with that. Masters & Johnson had a relationship with Kinsey as well as Harry Benjamin, who did work on transvestitism. There were a number of other researchers who were his contemporaries and who followed him that have been involved, but I’m not familiar with that.

(Applause)

Yamashiro Synopsis
by Carolyn Mimran

Jennifer Pearson Yamashiro began her presentation by introducing herself as a revisionist art historian and a middle-class, white, heterosexual, anti-censorship feminist, whose primary interest in visual imagery is exploring cultural meaning and whose goal is to be fair and reasonable when viewing works of art. She then introduced the Kinsey Institute, which is a center for researching human sexuality and which has a photographic archive of erotica. As a result, the institute has been the subject of much controversy since its foundation in 1947.

Yamashiro explained that the Kinsey Institute is an important and invaluable resource to our society not only for its broad and in-depth research of sexuality, but also for the way it highlights the complex, confounding, and often contradictory way that censorship has affected our nation over recent, and not so recent decades. Yamashiro gave a short history of the Kinsey Institute to explain the context in which it began. Started by Alfred Kinsey, who evolved from a biologist with a specialty in bugs to the leader of sex research at Indiana University, the institute was created with research as its priority as well as the collection of “supplementary material,” like the more than 75,000 photographs in the archive, now considered to be secondary sources.

Housed at Indiana University, where Kinsey taught about sex under the umbrella of a marriage class in the 1930s, the institute has been staunchly defended by the school administration throughout years of controversy. What people found most jarring was that Kinsey applied the same taxonomic methodology he used as an entomologist while studying wasps to human sexuality. However, what really snared his research was his difficulty in passing erotic materials from various countries overseas through U.S. Customs.

For the rest of the lecture, Yamashiro spoke specifically about one case involving 31 black and white photographs that were chosen because they were considered to be the most openly erotic in the test case. The photographs were cause for outcry, lawsuits, and are still subject to censorship to this day. Yamashiro explained that these seized photographs show how the relationship between photography, reality and documentation emerged. The photographs, shown to the audience as slides, depict sexually explicit behavior and were probably intended for a white male audience. Yamashiro then gave some historical context for the intended consumers of these photographs and speculated as to why these images were considered to be particularly offensive.

One of these “blatantly obscene” photographs depicted two women, genitalia exposed, engaged in “lesbian” activities. Yamashiro told the audience that she believes people found the photo to be offensive on a “deeper, cultural level” because of its context in post-war America. During the 1950s, homosexuality, like communism, was seen as un-American and a potential threat to the nation. Although the scenes in these photographs were obviously staged, the reality they conveyed contributed to their being rejected at the time, as did their implication that anyone should engage in such acts, many of which were illegal at the time.

Having won the lawsuit to release these photographs after Kinsey’s death in 1956, all the photographs in the Kinsey Institute’s collection are now protected by the law. However, in 1998 when Yamashiro, a curator at the institute for five years, was working to publish an essay in a book that would contain these images, she was told that the content would alienate and offend potential buyers and consequently the images were not included. Yamashiro then spoke about the implicit contradictions in censorship during the 1990s. She pointed out that while Hustler and Playboy thrive and Boogie Nights is seen as an acceptable film for mass consumption and the media is obsessed with the scandal and infidelity of our celebrities and politicians, the overall climate is still conservative and photographic images are still very censored in the world of publishing.
After establishing that context, Yamashiro showed some more photographs from the collection and left the audience to ponder what it is about these pictures that would strike a nerve with today’s viewers. After the lecture the audience was full of questions, and a discussion was opened up, bringing important and worthwhile comments, opinions and insights to the foreground.