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Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we try to put things back together again. It's sort of the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts. And of course, all the King's horses and all the kings men can't put us back together again because the attendance of power will never solve our problems for us. It's up to us to collectively solve our own problems. I'm your guest host with all the dramatic metaphors,
Margaret Giljoy. Today it's one of those things falling apart episodes. Today we're going to be talking about the Kinsey Institute for Research and Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, a research institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to quote foster and promote a greater understanding of human sexuality and relationships to research, outreach, education, and historical preservation. The Kinsey Institute, in many ways, isn't just a sexual research center. It's the sexual research center.
We're going to be talking to Dev Montonez, who last week gave me a tour of the center. But first being me, I want to give you all context. I'm going to talk about history. I'm going to talk about a different institute for sexual research called well, the Institute for Sexual Research, except it was in Berlin from nineteen nineteen to nineteen thirty three, so they called it the
Institute for Sexual Wistenschaft. History sometimes remembers it as Hirschfeldt Institute after Magnus Hirschfeldt, the director of it for fourteen years. The institute researched human sexuality. They offered consulting on matters
of sex to straight and gay people. They pioneered a ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for the shocking at the time idea that trans people are happier if we're just allowed to socially transition and live as our preferred gender, which they observed led to a dramatic drop in suicide rates. This is medical practice that has continued, and we have more and more research about that to this day. The institute coined the terms transvestite and transsexual.
They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in known history on a woman named Dora Richter in nineteen thirty. They worked alongside pro homosexual advocacy groups. Germany led the Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties. It was founded by three Jewish researchers, the most famous of whom is the director Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute itself, however, is famous today for one thing.
Imagine a picture of a book burning. The first picture that comes to your mind is probably black and white, and it's of Nazis. This photo is used any time someone wants to say something like, the Nazis are bad, they burned books. What usually goes it was unsaid when this photo is reproduced, is what books those Nazis were burning. They were burning the institute. On May sixth, nineteen thirty three, Nazis burned around twenty thousand books, destroying endless amounts of
research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross dressing. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a speech to forty thousand people during that book burning, so ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first transwoman to undergo gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter. She was either killed in this attack or she was arrested and died in prison.
Shortly thereafter. Her exact fate is unknown. Magnus himself was out of the country at the time, and he never returned. He died in exile in France. This, I believe, is the context we need to hold onto when we talk about the Kinsey Institute, when we talk about what they're facing today, as we watch people running for office in this country wielding flamethrowers to burn books and campaign ads,
while librarians face criminal penalties for making books available to students. Eventually, the Nazis were defeated, of course, they were defeated through force of arms, after great loss of life and a coming together of ideological enemies like capitalists and authoritarian communists.
Shortly thereafter, in nineteen forty seven, a bisexual, polyamorous sexologist named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his own Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, seventy seven years ago for those keeping track. Thereafter, he produced work that's foundational to modern sexology. Most famous today is the Kinsey Scale,
which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality out of a binary. Maybe the most famous at the time of his work, though, was his nineteen forty eight book Sexual Behavior and the Human Male in his later book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which are often called the Kinsey Reports, which offered groundbreaking analysis like it turns out women enjoy sex also and also that thirty seven percent of men had had quote overt homosexual experience to orgasm, which shocked the
hell out of the world. Well, it probably shocked about sixty seven percent of the world. Since then, the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology research institutes and archives in the world, and now in the twenty twenties, it finds itself at the center of a culture war and conservative backlash. For decades, the right wing has tried and failed to find evidence that Kinsey himself was a pedophile.
Last February, the Republican government of Indiana voted for House Bill one thousand and one, which bars state money from funding the institute. To tell us what's happened with that, what the future of the institute is likely to be, and how all this ties into the culture wars that we're living through right now, we have Dev Montanez, the admin coordinator of the institute and a student at Indiana University. Hi Dev Hey, Thanks for listening to my long intro.
It's good for me to, you know, know some of the history behind the place that I'm at forty hours a week.
So could you introduce yourself about a little bit about the work that you do at the institute And I don't know maybe what brought you there, but just yeah.
So I started back in early twenty twenty two as kind of the person who was spearheading the seventy fifth anniversary celebrations that we were.
Going to have.
And I am lucky enough that I have a background in DIY punk and so my organization skills are largely from that and not from any type of institution. Somehow, those skills go over really well in academia. Okay, a few of my friends that are like postdocs and stuff that are now in you know, academic worlds, are like, oh yeah, this has helped me, you know, running shows has really helped me run research projects.
Oh yeah, because it's all about having your own initiative and working for people exactly and interesting.
Yeah, it's been. It's been great to see and kind of be in the middle of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was originally at Rutgers and then I didn't finish my degree there. Dropped out because of financial issues, of course, as that's what happens when you're in college. Yeah, and I was in Bloomington for a long time, almost seven years, I want to say, before I started working here. And I started working here, and I was like, well, I get like a little bit of tuition reimbursement for working here, I might as well finish it. So now I'm at the purpose of or at the standstill of my life,
where I am back in school and working full time. Yeah, mainly just to get it over.
With, get working full time over with.
Uh No, well I wish get the degree over with.
The debt, I might as well have it.
Yeah, So okay, So you work for the Kinsey Institute, and the Kinsey Institute is totally fine and on solid footing and is completely okay. So this is the thing that surprised me, you know, when I came and visited the Kinsey Institute and thank you for the tour of the institute. I the Kinsey Institute is such a institute, such a monolith, such a a thing that has existed
for so long. It's hard for me to imagine people being really mad at it, Like it's it's hard for me to imagine that it's in trouble and it seems too big to fail, but like not too big, but too institutional, too important, Like I can't imagine someone saying, oh, we want to get rid of this incredibly important historical thing. I guess that's what a lot of the culture wars actually are about. So what's going on?
Okay, so last summer, but it was like the budget vote I think for Indiana government, state government, and they someone Larisa sweet is her name, the representative who proposed this, basically decided to say Kensing's too is perverts, and you we shouldn't fund them with state money, which would you know under I guess understandable. But we're not funded by
state money. Okay, only like a small percentage of the university as a whole is funded by state government, so it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying for us to exist. We are able to utilize the services of the university, which is very helpful in the case of being If we were like a nonprofit, we'd probably have to do a lot of that work, like legwork in terms of like keep of a building, like we'd have to do that.
On our own right.
But the university, the state government does not fund us. We're funded by donors. We're funded by grants that we receive and endowments that exist that other people have given us because they believe in the worst that we do and they want to see it continue.
So why are they trying to go after the wrong source of your funding? And how does it end up impacting you like that they've passed this you know, essentially law to take money away from you that you weren't using.
Yeah, So the big thing is that there is a lot of misinformation about Alfred Kinsey and his first book, The Human Behavior of the sorry the Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, And there is a table within it of doctor Kinsey. When he did his research, he interviewed people specifically to ask them, you know, when were you first, like first realizing your sexual arousal.
And some people.
Said, you know, I was this age, I was twelve, I was five. And as a child, you know that you play around with your body because you're learning it because you've never used most of these things before.
It's brand new.
And so he had years in their ages in there that were younger than anyone that is cannservative. Would want to believe that you would be sexually.
Aroused, right unless you're going to marry a heterosexually into a pastor Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, child marriage is coming back, So there's that too. Yeah, So there's that that exists. Is a lot of people who don't understand the research that he does.
Period.
There was a lot of backlash when he had when he did his work because people didn't want to believe that anyone was having premarital sex, that anyone was homosexual and it was normal, or that anyone any woman enjoys sex, right because it's for one thing only, right.
So they looked at this chart that said five year olds experienced sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five year olds? Is that.
Basically, or rather that he was doing experiments on five year olds. His work is like physical because he is a zoologist, right, biologist by nature. And I'm going to guess they think that any research that you do has to be with a person in one room and not you know, social interviews or oral histographies, like they don't put those two things together.
Right, And I was reading that they have a lot of I was expecting when I when I looked at this, I was expecting to find like op eds from the fifties or something, But I'm finding things from twenty twenty three of people throwing a fit about the fact that he during some of this he did like, I mean, he was kinky. It seemed like right, he like filmed himself fucking, and he filmed his wife fucking, and he a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he
was around for. And that's like meant to mean that he is a horrible, weird monster.
Yeah, And truly, none of my work has anything to do with or literally anyone's work has anything to do with what Kinsey might have done when he was here, because he died so like within eight years of the.
Institute even being a thing.
Yeah, so.
I don't know, it's not important to the work that we do now, even if he was a kinky person, Like people that get into sex research are interested in sex, so he wanted to.
Try stuff out. I guess, like, who does it. That's like the point of being alive.
No, No, actually, the point of being alive is buying goods and services from our advertisers. I don't know if you knew this. I think you thought it was about seeking joy, but it's actually about filling the gaping mall at the center of your life with products like these ones. And we're back. Okay, So obviously people have a problem with this man who's been dead since the fifties, and therefore I'm mad at this institute that keeps track of a lot of stuff over the years, like an archive.
What do they when they try to pull state funding from you? How does that impact you? You were saying that that's like not you know, does it primarily impact you because everyone's suddenly aware of and mad at you again, or does it actually also like is it going to cut your funding? Like what's happening.
So what's happening is there's now a I don't want to say like a disagreement, but there's a there's people trying to figure out how to be compliant with this law, which means that they need to go into certain administrative burdens to prove that we don't get these fonts. Okay, that's really all that it is. Otherwise we are pretty
good standing. It's it's more so at least now. The board of Trustie's voted on Friday and they basically brought in the president's recommendation of do not separate us from the from the university, and so that happened on Friday, March first was the day that that went through. So
we are all feeling pretty good. We all kind of had a little bit of a not so much a victory lap, but like a we've been hearing this for the last six months of worrying about what's going to happen to this place that we all love and that carries so many things because of the librarians who are around in the artifice. Who are around aren't the people handling the collection, And the legislature later decides, I, you in a university can't hold anything that is obscene.
I scene is you know I have the beholder.
Yeah, it could easily mean that this, like six hundred thousand artifacts that we hold in our collections are gone and we have stuff that spans two thousand years. It's not just items that are around today, and everything that we get is donated. We don't buy any of the items per secon People just mail them to.
Us, the kind of things that normally if you mail to someone you might get in trouble.
Yes, exactly, and that was kind of the people still think they're going to get in trouble.
Yeah, kind of the point.
Like I've heard that people have like shipped porn in cereal boxes as a way to like hide them because they're still worried that the Comstock law is around in a way that will make these items be destroyed.
Yeah. Well, okay, Oh, there's so many parts of this that I want to talk about. I actually thought about this because I mailed a book from the Kinsey Institute to someone last week, and as I was packaging it up, I was thinking to myself, this used to be a crime,
the Comstock laws. For anyone who's curious, there was this historical pervert named Comstock, And by that I mean he was the largest collector of porn of his era who was on a wild crusade against perversion and birth control and all of these things, and he went around and stopped people. He got all these laws passed that he can't pass pornographic materials through the US.
Maile.
That was like his big contribution to society, besides ruining an awful lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again, like the ghost of the comstock laws. Do you want to talk about that.
Yeah, So we have book bans happening within libraries. I honestly, I am not positive what is happening within Indiana libraries.
But there is a.
Group of I would say parent groups, but I don't even know that they're actually still parents of children. It's usually like women in their mid fifties and later who are running for superintendent or the school board whatever, and now coming up with these ways that children can't interact with items that maybe have never been illegal in the past, so to speak. Like if any book mentions sex of any kind, right, it can't be around. If anyone is
homosexual in any of the books, it's banned in their eyes. Yeah, and you know a majority of our books are a lot of those things.
I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there if you look really hard.
Well. I today I was in the reading room that we have and we had out the It was called the like Wild Edibles of the Eastern North America, And it was a book written by Alfred Kinsey because he was a he.
Was like an eagle scout, yeah, like loved nature.
He was one of the first eagle scouts.
Actually, yeah, you know more about him than I too.
I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction.
But a lot of those groups, like Moms for Liberty, they're the ones who are like a big crusade right now. When I first started, we just got a statue installed behind our building of Alfred Kinsey, and that is kind of when the majority of the threats that we would get started. Okay, when they start talking about this statue. I have talked to people that have worked here for twenty years and they have said they've never seen threats come in like this ever before.
Yeah.
So it's people talking about like bombing the statue, calls about you know, being a sexual predator, a deviant, or you know, you guys should all die, and it's very directed at us, right, It's it's less of being directed at like a random abstract thing.
Right.
We have gotten a lot of harassment in terms of like people who because they think, oh, you do sex research, so you want a picture of my dick?
So interesting.
Yeah, so that will happen at times.
You all should do an exhibit of the dick pics that have been donated so kindly to your institution and the individuals who work for it, are are a rating system underneath.
I'm sure a curator, a compassman will love that. We actually just got in donated to us was the Cynthia plaster Casters, her Dick molds that she did of the in the eighties. She's like a famous groupieka like rock stars. So we have like Jimmy Hendrick's keenis whoa you know, bronze mold and that's the next big exhibition that's supposed to happen. But we also have like Jello Biafra whow Okay, it's hilarious.
Would you all get never mind? I was thinking abou how you all can make some money?
Lots of people are thinking of that.
Yeah, okay, huh well no, it's okay. So it's so interesting to me, right because it seems like their attempt to shut you down legislatively was a swing and a miss. Right. It was this thing that they they thought that they had this thing that they're like, haha, we're going to get those perverts by cutting off their funding. And then everyone was like, well, that's not where the funding comes from. And the university was like we kind of like this place.
It's been around for seventy seven years. It's literally the only reason anyone outside of Indiana has ever heard of us. Yeah, is that kind.
Of a that's definitely the vibe we had like a series of listening sessions with the higher administration of like the public, well the university public coming in and just basically a lot of them saying the Kinzians too.
Is the only reason why I came to Ium.
The fact that this is here allows me to do my research, even if their research is in like Eastern European.
You know, like faberge Eggs.
Right, So it gives people a chance to see that like academic freedom and like freedom to research what you want is possible, and not just possible, but like encouraged. Right, Like, as an R one university, we should be doing we should be researching things that aren't or taboo at times, Yeah, and are actually trying to help the world rather than making money for.
Some investor somewhere.
Right, No, because that seems like the entire point of academia, right, Academia. Okay, this is really interesting to me because I have kind of a bit of a love hate relationship with academia, and you know, there's a lot of critiques that can be laid at sort of ivory tower and locking away
information and things. But yet as we enter this sort of anti intellectual time that is absolutely a right wing culture war thing is to be anti intellectual and in this case, specifically shut down the academy's ability to preserve
and transfer knowledge. Like, the problem from my point of view is that when there are limits to how well the information can be transferred, Rather than the right wing anti intellectualism, well, I anti intellectualism broadly, I'm not trying to make a case for any other kind of it is a problem with the actual gi existence of this knowledge, right, It's this like forbidden knowledge that no one should know that thirty seven percent of men in the nineteen forties
like got a handy, you know exactly.
The weird thing is that our collections are literally open to anyone who wants to come. We don't need to test it in any way. Well, yeah, that happens often, which to me is great and is kind of hard to come across in any archive. Usually, if you have an archive, like you need to have an affiliation with a university or a company in order to come and
look at some of these things. Yeah, you know, I mean that's not to say that like anyone comes in and they are doing lude things like there we talk with everyone that comes in, right, there's there's no mystery happening. Really okay, there's no sex dungeon. I was a little I think, yeah, it's really boring. It's just a beige hallway for the most part.
But you know what isn't boring that I have to interject quickly is supporting by like I'm never bored while I'm in the process of exchanging little pictures of dead people for products and services like the ones that support this podcast. And we're back, and I feel really guilty for literally cutting you off mid sentence in order to do that. I'm so sorry.
It's weird to be on the other side of this to actually see do that. Yeah, one of the big things that happened when I first started was Bloomington has a big pride. Bloomington as a whole is what they call like a blue pocket and the rest of the red the sea of red of Indiana. But I've also heard people say, like, you know, like Indiana went to Obama in two thousand and eight, like it's not as red as.
People really think it is.
Right, it's that like it just came out today that we're like the fiftieth in voter turnout.
WHOA, that's bad. That's really sad.
Yeah, but people are so disheartened, Like it feels it's really hard when these people are yelling about how conservative Indiana is constantly that it gets in everyone's head that, oh, it doesn't matter that what I do, which I love hate. Yeah, I have a love hate relationship with voting, but I also understand that, like I kind of need to in this capacity of where I am right because it really can change on a dime.
Right.
I think my my personal representative, he was elected by like eleven votes, and he is a horrible, horrible man.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I when I get his fucking mailers that just say some dumb shit about trans laws, and I just go, I can't with this.
Yeah, I get pissed because cowboy hat and his mailers.
No, but he looks Okay, ye, that makes sense.
There's no cowboys where I live. It's the mountains. Take off the cowboy hat and put on a real tree baseball cap like everyone else in this town. Poser Okay, sorry anyway, uh huh.
So a lot of what's going on is that people think that Indiana is super right wing. And as someone who's who came here from the East Coast, like, I love it here, Like it's really beauty full in Indiana. Yeah, I like not being around a lot of people. Bloomington says that there it's a really small town, but it really is like eighty thousand people when the students aren't here, which is still.
To me a lot of people.
Yeah, but it is small.
Comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast, right. But everyone I've met here, I will say, there's great organizers that live here.
There's a great.
Amount of community and just like building of coalitions between people that I haven't really seen elsewhere, Okay, which is really important. And it's not just through the university, which I think is most people will think it's all here, But there's so many people outside of the university that do amazing work that maybe came here to go to school but ended up staying, or just came here because this used to be like the folk punk capital.
That's true. That is whatever when I was going to Bloomington, that is what everyone asked. No one asked me about the Kinsey Institute everyone asked me about folk punk. Yeah, my interests align more to the Kinsey Institute person. No one get mad at me. Well, okay, so it's interesting.
So in my mind, you're like, oh, okay, the right wing came for the kinsianstudent and they just failed, right, And is that missing the fact that you had a lot of organizers and a lot of people working to defend the Kinsey Institute.
I think so I wouldn't even say that it was a failure. It was more of they really don't understand what we do and even how these institutions work. I think is the real thing is that they are so cut up in how things should work. They don't actually look into how like neoliberalism is everywhere and it is. I don't think they understand what that is and how much it's infected, how bureaucratic everything is, and how everything is interconnected constantly.
So that's why they thought tax money would be the thing, But it's actually this complicated capitalist system.
Yes, I mean, maybe if they listen to some other people and they're about capitalism, they would probably get more, you know, more people to come behind them. But for the most part, the folks who are are loud and.
Proud about that.
They they don't know what we do. They don't know who we are either. They think they do.
Good since they're trying to murder you.
Yeah, the director got docked the first year I was here. That was fun, and there was a protest with some three percenters on campus. And we work very closely with Bloomington Pridle out of the time, and so there's always the worry of people showing up there.
Yeah.
But again, like I said, like everyone here is there's so many good organizers that they've kept this town safe for so long, and I think they'll continue to do that.
That's cool. I like when we learn and when we reinforce the fact that the thing that keeps us safe is organizing and is like community organizing and getting people together to keep track of what's going on and counter it.
Yeah.
One of the big things that we focus on in terms of like our research goals is well being.
And that's always something that has stuck with me.
Because to me, the well being is us keeping each other safe. And I remember when this all first happened. I remember talking to the director and just being like, those people aren't going to help us.
We are going to help each other.
Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, you're right.
We are.
It's like, yeah, we're not, Like we kind of can't count on everyone else sometimes these big institutions, because we know what we're doing, but they maybe don't know what we're doing, and maybe it's time that we just tell more people about it.
I like that. I also like that it specifically points out that they did right by hiring a diy punk into their institution.
You know. I yeah, I get a lot of weird flat but not being an academic right, But then it comes to things like this and it's like, oh, I always hear like, well we made their choice, yeah, which is it is nice to feel unfortunately in a job.
Yeah. No, that makes some sense if people want to support you all as individuals who are facing this trouble, or the Kinsey Institute in general, or even just like, if you have advice for people who are stuck engaging in the culture war more directly because they don't live on the coasts, what would you what would you say? How can people support.
To support each other. We have a nice queer sports league here, and I suggest playing kickball with your friends. It's been really cool, and also doing a honky tonk night. That's our big, our big thing.
Cool.
I'm really proud of everyone that has put that stuff together because it has created a world that has brings people from all different parts together of the town.
Yeah.
For the institute, if you want to go to Kinsey Institute dot org. That is kind of where you can see everything. You can support us by coming and learning more about sexual research and your history because it's all of our history in terms of learning about how people lived and how we have like the most mundane things. Yeah, we talked about Hirschfeld earlier. We have a scrap book of his and that is like the oldest thing of his.
That's like his personal item that we have, Yeah, along with like published items, but that's like the big thing.
Yeah, he was almost fifty when he started the institute. I think I'm like kind of doing the math in my head really quickly because he was born in the nineteenth century. Yeah, Okay, Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this stuff. I'm so glad that this didn't you know, when we first talked about this, we didn't know which way the vote was going to go. I'm glad to do a little bit of a celebratory talk about this important institution. And yeah, thank you so much.
Thank you, And if you want to follow, hear me more. I have a different podcast. It's Cool People Did cool stuff, and it's also on cool Zone Media, which is the thing you're listening to right now. I hope you all are doing as well as you can with everything that's going on and putting each other back together again. We're all no, I'm not even gonna close with a humpty dumpty metaphor. I'm just done.
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