The Kinsey Institute, and Sexual Research, Under Attack

Margaret talks with Dev Montanez from the Kinsey Institute, an almost-80-year-old sexual research center whose funding is suddenly caught up in the current culture war.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
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,

(00:29):
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,

(00:51):
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

(01:13):
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.

(01:35):
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

(01:58):
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

(02:24):
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

(02:47):
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,

(03:11):
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

(03:33):
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

(03:54):
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

(04:14):
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

(04:37):
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

(04:59):
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

(05:20):
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.

(05:42):
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

(06:04):
admin coordinator of the institute and a student at Indiana University.
Hi Dev Hey, Thanks for listening to my long intro.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
It's good for me to, you know, know some of
the history behind the place that I'm at forty hours
a week.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:35):
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.

Speaker 4 (06:45):
Going to have.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
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

(07:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Oh yeah, because it's all about having your own initiative
and working for people exactly and interesting.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah, it's been. It's been great to see and kind
of be in the middle of it.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:30):
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

(07:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
With, get working full time over with.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Uh No, well I wish get the degree over with.

Speaker 4 (08:19):
The debt, I might as well have it.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
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,

(08:42):
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,

(09:06):
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?

Speaker 3 (09:16):
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

(09:43):
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

(10:06):
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.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
On our own right.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
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

(11:25):
people specifically to ask them, you know, when were you first,
like first realizing your sexual arousal.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
And some people.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
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.

Speaker 4 (11:50):
It's brand new.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Aroused, right unless you're going to marry a heterosexually into
a pastor Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
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.

Speaker 4 (12:20):
Period.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
So they looked at this chart that said five year
olds experienced sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five year olds?
Is that.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
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

(13:15):
you know, social interviews or oral histographies, like they don't
put those two things together.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
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

(13:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (14:10):
Institute even being a thing.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
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.

Speaker 4 (14:27):
Try stuff out. I guess, like, who does it. That's
like the point of being alive.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
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.

(15:02):
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

(15:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
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,

(15:56):
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,

(16:21):
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

(16:43):
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.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
I scene is you know I have the beholder.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Us, the kind of things that normally if you mail
to someone you might get in trouble.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yes, exactly, and that was kind of the people still
think they're going to get in trouble.

Speaker 4 (17:40):
Yeah, kind of the point.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
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

(18:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
Maile.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Yeah, So we have book bans happening within libraries. I honestly,
I am not positive what is happening within Indiana libraries.

Speaker 4 (19:04):
But there is a.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
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

(19:28):
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,

(19:50):
and you know a majority of our books are a
lot of those things.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there if you
look really hard.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
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.

Speaker 4 (20:15):
Was like an eagle scout, yeah, like loved nature.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
He was one of the first eagle scouts.

Speaker 4 (20:20):
Actually, yeah, you know more about him than I too.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
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

(20:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Right.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
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?

Speaker 2 (21:35):
So interesting.

Speaker 4 (21:37):
Yeah, so that will happen at times.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
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,

(22:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Would you all get never mind? I was thinking abou
how you all can make some money?

Speaker 4 (22:32):
Lots of people are thinking of that.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
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

(22:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
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.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
Is the only reason why I came to Ium.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
The fact that this is here allows me to do
my research, even if their research is in like Eastern European.

Speaker 4 (23:36):
You know, like faberge Eggs.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
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,

(24:01):
and are actually trying to help the world rather than
making money for.

Speaker 4 (24:08):
Some investor somewhere.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
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

(24:32):
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

(24:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
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

(25:38):
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.

(26:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
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

(26:44):
for literally cutting you off mid sentence in order to
do that. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
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

(27:08):
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.

Speaker 4 (27:21):
People really think it is.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Right, it's that like it just came out today that
we're like the fiftieth in voter turnout.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
WHOA, that's bad. That's really sad.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
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

(27:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
Right.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
I think my my personal representative, he was elected by
like eleven votes, and he is a horrible, horrible man.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, I get pissed because cowboy hat and his mailers.

Speaker 4 (28:31):
No, but he looks Okay, ye, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
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

(29:08):
really is like eighty thousand people when the students aren't here,
which is still.

Speaker 4 (29:12):
To me a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, but it is small.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast, right. But everyone
I've met here, I will say, there's great organizers that
live here.

Speaker 4 (29:25):
There's a great.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
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

(29:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
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

(30:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
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

(30:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
So that's why they thought tax money would be the thing,
But it's actually this complicated capitalist system.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
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.

Speaker 4 (31:33):
Proud about that.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
They they don't know what we do. They don't know
who we are either. They think they do.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Good since they're trying to murder you.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
One of the big things that we focus on in
terms of like our research goals is well being.

Speaker 4 (32:38):
And that's always something that has stuck with me.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:53):
We are going to help each other.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, you're right.

Speaker 4 (32:56):
We are.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
I like that. I also like that it specifically points
out that they did right by hiring a diy punk
into their institution.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
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?

(34:00):
How can people support.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
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,

(34:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
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

(35:35):
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

(35:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.