Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast
Speaker 2: about things falling apart and how we try to put
Speaker 2: things back together again. It's sort of the Humpty Dumpty
Speaker 2: of podcasts. And of course, all the King's horses and
Speaker 2: all the kings men can't put us back together again
Speaker 2: because the attendance of power will never solve our problems
Speaker 2: for us. It's up to us to collectively solve our
Speaker 2: own problems. I'm your guest host with all the dramatic metaphors,
Speaker 2: Margaret Giljoy. Today it's one of those things falling apart episodes.
Speaker 2: Today we're going to be talking about the Kinsey Institute
Speaker 2: for Research and Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, a research institute
Speaker 2: in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to quote foster and
Speaker 2: promote a greater understanding of human sexuality and relationships to research, outreach, education,
Speaker 2: and historical preservation. The Kinsey Institute, in many ways, isn't
Speaker 2: just a sexual research center. It's the sexual research center.
Speaker 2: We're going to be talking to Dev Montonez, who last
Speaker 2: week gave me a tour of the center. But first
Speaker 2: being me, I want to give you all context. I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk about history. I'm going to talk about
Speaker 2: a different institute for sexual research called well, the Institute
Speaker 2: for Sexual Research, except it was in Berlin from nineteen
Speaker 2: nineteen to nineteen thirty three, so they called it the
Speaker 2: Institute for Sexual Wistenschaft. History sometimes remembers it as Hirschfeldt
Speaker 2: Institute after Magnus Hirschfeldt, the director of it for fourteen years.
Speaker 2: The institute researched human sexuality. They offered consulting on matters
Speaker 2: of sex to straight and gay people. They pioneered a
Speaker 2: ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for the shocking
Speaker 2: at the time idea that trans people are happier if
Speaker 2: we're just allowed to socially transition and live as our
Speaker 2: preferred gender, which they observed led to a dramatic drop
Speaker 2: in suicide rates. This is medical practice that has continued,
Speaker 2: and we have more and more research about that to
Speaker 2: this day. The institute coined the terms transvestite and transsexual.
Speaker 2: They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in known history
Speaker 2: on a woman named Dora Richter in nineteen thirty. They
Speaker 2: worked alongside pro homosexual advocacy groups. Germany led the Western
Speaker 2: world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 2: and early nineteen thirties. It was founded by three Jewish researchers,
Speaker 2: the most famous of whom is the director Magnus Hirschfeld.
Speaker 2: The institute itself, however, is famous today for one thing.
Speaker 2: Imagine a picture of a book burning. The first picture
Speaker 2: that comes to your mind is probably black and white,
Speaker 2: and it's of Nazis. This photo is used any time
Speaker 2: someone wants to say something like, the Nazis are bad,
Speaker 2: they burned books. What usually goes it was unsaid when
Speaker 2: this photo is reproduced, is what books those Nazis were burning.
Speaker 2: They were burning the institute. On May sixth, nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 2: Nazis burned around twenty thousand books, destroying endless amounts of
Speaker 2: research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross dressing. Joseph Goebbels, the
Speaker 2: chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a
Speaker 2: speech to forty thousand people during that book burning, so
Speaker 2: ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first transwoman to
Speaker 2: undergo gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter. She was either killed
Speaker 2: in this attack or she was arrested and died in prison.
Speaker 2: Shortly thereafter. Her exact fate is unknown. Magnus himself was
Speaker 2: out of the country at the time, and he never returned.
Speaker 2: He died in exile in France. This, I believe, is
Speaker 2: the context we need to hold onto when we talk
Speaker 2: about the Kinsey Institute, when we talk about what they're
Speaker 2: facing today, as we watch people running for office in
Speaker 2: this country wielding flamethrowers to burn books and campaign ads,
Speaker 2: while librarians face criminal penalties for making books available to students. Eventually,
Speaker 2: the Nazis were defeated, of course, they were defeated through
Speaker 2: force of arms, after great loss of life and a
Speaker 2: coming together of ideological enemies like capitalists and authoritarian communists.
Speaker 2: Shortly thereafter, in nineteen forty seven, a bisexual, polyamorous sexologist
Speaker 2: named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his own Institute for Sex
Speaker 2: Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, seventy seven years
Speaker 2: ago for those keeping track. Thereafter, he produced work that's
Speaker 2: foundational to modern sexology. Most famous today is the Kinsey Scale,
Speaker 2: which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality out of a binary. Maybe
Speaker 2: the most famous at the time of his work, though,
Speaker 2: was his nineteen forty eight book Sexual Behavior and the
Speaker 2: Human Male in his later book, Sexual Behavior in the
Speaker 2: Human Female, which are often called the Kinsey Reports, which
Speaker 2: offered groundbreaking analysis like it turns out women enjoy sex
Speaker 2: also and also that thirty seven percent of men had
Speaker 2: had quote overt homosexual experience to orgasm, which shocked the
Speaker 2: hell out of the world. Well, it probably shocked about
Speaker 2: sixty seven percent of the world. Since then, the Kinsey
Speaker 2: Institute has been one of the premier sexology research institutes
Speaker 2: and archives in the world, and now in the twenty twenties,
Speaker 2: it finds itself at the center of a culture war
Speaker 2: and conservative backlash. For decades, the right wing has tried
Speaker 2: and failed to find evidence that Kinsey himself was a pedophile.
Speaker 2: Last February, the Republican government of Indiana voted for House
Speaker 2: Bill one thousand and one, which bars state money from
Speaker 2: funding the institute. To tell us what's happened with that,
Speaker 2: what the future of the institute is likely to be,
Speaker 2: and how all this ties into the culture wars that
Speaker 2: we're living through right now, we have Dev Montanez, the
Speaker 2: admin coordinator of the institute and a student at Indiana University.
Speaker 2: Hi Dev Hey, Thanks for listening to my long intro.
Speaker 3: It's good for me to, you know, know some of
Speaker 3: the history behind the place that I'm at forty hours
Speaker 3: a week.
Speaker 2: So could you introduce yourself about a little bit about
Speaker 2: the work that you do at the institute And I
Speaker 2: don't know maybe what brought you there, but just yeah.
Speaker 3: So I started back in early twenty twenty two as
Speaker 3: kind of the person who was spearheading the seventy fifth
Speaker 3: anniversary celebrations that we were.
Speaker 4: Going to have.
Speaker 3: And I am lucky enough that I have a background
Speaker 3: in DIY punk and so my organization skills are largely
Speaker 3: from that and not from any type of institution. Somehow,
Speaker 3: those skills go over really well in academia. Okay, a
Speaker 3: few of my friends that are like postdocs and stuff
Speaker 3: that are now in you know, academic worlds, are like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, this has helped me, you know, running shows
Speaker 3: has really helped me run research projects.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, because it's all about having your own initiative
Speaker 2: and working for people exactly and interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been. It's been great to see and kind
Speaker 3: of be in the middle of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was originally at Rutgers and then I didn't finish
Speaker 3: my degree there. Dropped out because of financial issues, of course,
Speaker 3: as that's what happens when you're in college. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I was in Bloomington for a long time, almost seven years,
Speaker 3: I want to say, before I started working here. And
Speaker 3: I started working here, and I was like, well, I
Speaker 3: get like a little bit of tuition reimbursement for working here,
Speaker 3: I might as well finish it. So now I'm at
Speaker 3: the purpose of or at the standstill of my life,
Speaker 3: where I am back in school and working full time. Yeah,
Speaker 3: mainly just to get it over.
Speaker 2: With, get working full time over with.
Speaker 3: Uh No, well I wish get the degree over with.
Speaker 4: The debt, I might as well have it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So okay, So you work for the Kinsey Institute,
Speaker 2: and the Kinsey Institute is totally fine and on solid
Speaker 2: footing and is completely okay. So this is the thing
Speaker 2: that surprised me, you know, when I came and visited
Speaker 2: the Kinsey Institute and thank you for the tour of
Speaker 2: the institute. I the Kinsey Institute is such a institute,
Speaker 2: such a monolith, such a a thing that has existed
Speaker 2: for so long. It's hard for me to imagine people
Speaker 2: being really mad at it, Like it's it's hard for
Speaker 2: me to imagine that it's in trouble and it seems
Speaker 2: too big to fail, but like not too big, but
Speaker 2: too institutional, too important, Like I can't imagine someone saying, oh,
Speaker 2: we want to get rid of this incredibly important historical thing.
Speaker 2: I guess that's what a lot of the culture wars
Speaker 2: actually are about. So what's going on?
Speaker 3: Okay, so last summer, but it was like the budget
Speaker 3: vote I think for Indiana government, state government, and they
Speaker 3: someone Larisa sweet is her name, the representative who proposed this,
Speaker 3: basically decided to say Kensing's too is perverts, and you
Speaker 3: we shouldn't fund them with state money, which would you
Speaker 3: know under I guess understandable. But we're not funded by
Speaker 3: state money. Okay, only like a small percentage of the
Speaker 3: university as a whole is funded by state government, so
Speaker 3: it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying for
Speaker 3: us to exist. We are able to utilize the services
Speaker 3: of the university, which is very helpful in the case
Speaker 3: of being If we were like a nonprofit, we'd probably
Speaker 3: have to do a lot of that work, like legwork
Speaker 3: in terms of like keep of a building, like we'd
Speaker 3: have to do that.
Speaker 4: On our own right.
Speaker 3: But the university, the state government does not fund us.
Speaker 3: We're funded by donors. We're funded by grants that we
Speaker 3: receive and endowments that exist that other people have given
Speaker 3: us because they believe in the worst that we do
Speaker 3: and they want to see it continue.
Speaker 2: So why are they trying to go after the wrong
Speaker 2: source of your funding? And how does it end up
Speaker 2: impacting you like that they've passed this you know, essentially
Speaker 2: law to take money away from you that you weren't using.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the big thing is that there is a
Speaker 3: lot of misinformation about Alfred Kinsey and his first book,
Speaker 3: The Human Behavior of the sorry the Sexual Behavior of
Speaker 3: the Human Male, And there is a table within it
Speaker 3: of doctor Kinsey. When he did his research, he interviewed
Speaker 3: people specifically to ask them, you know, when were you first,
Speaker 3: like first realizing your sexual arousal.
Speaker 4: And some people.
Speaker 3: Said, you know, I was this age, I was twelve,
Speaker 3: I was five. And as a child, you know that
Speaker 3: you play around with your body because you're learning it
Speaker 3: because you've never used most of these things before.
Speaker 4: It's brand new.
Speaker 3: And so he had years in their ages in there
Speaker 3: that were younger than anyone that is cannservative. Would want
Speaker 3: to believe that you would be sexually.
Speaker 2: Aroused, right unless you're going to marry a heterosexually into
Speaker 2: a pastor Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, child marriage is coming back, So there's that too. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So there's that that exists. Is a lot of people
Speaker 3: who don't understand the research that he does.
Speaker 4: Period.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of backlash when he had when
Speaker 3: he did his work because people didn't want to believe
Speaker 3: that anyone was having premarital sex, that anyone was homosexual
Speaker 3: and it was normal, or that anyone any woman enjoys sex,
Speaker 3: right because it's for one thing only, right.
Speaker 2: So they looked at this chart that said five year
Speaker 2: olds experienced sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five year olds?
Speaker 2: Is that.
Speaker 3: Basically, or rather that he was doing experiments on five
Speaker 3: year olds. His work is like physical because he is
Speaker 3: a zoologist, right, biologist by nature. And I'm going to
Speaker 3: guess they think that any research that you do has
Speaker 3: to be with a person in one room and not
Speaker 3: you know, social interviews or oral histographies, like they don't
Speaker 3: put those two things together.
Speaker 2: Right, And I was reading that they have a lot
Speaker 2: of I was expecting when I when I looked at this,
Speaker 2: I was expecting to find like op eds from the
Speaker 2: fifties or something, But I'm finding things from twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three of people throwing a fit about the fact that
Speaker 2: he during some of this he did like, I mean,
Speaker 2: he was kinky. It seemed like right, he like filmed
Speaker 2: himself fucking, and he filmed his wife fucking, and he
Speaker 2: a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he
Speaker 2: was around for. And that's like meant to mean that
Speaker 2: he is a horrible, weird monster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And truly, none of my work has anything to
Speaker 3: do with or literally anyone's work has anything to do
Speaker 3: with what Kinsey might have done when he was here,
Speaker 3: because he died so like within eight years of the.
Speaker 4: Institute even being a thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's not important to the work that
Speaker 3: we do now, even if he was a kinky person,
Speaker 3: Like people that get into sex research are interested in sex,
Speaker 3: so he wanted to.
Speaker 4: Try stuff out. I guess, like, who does it. That's
Speaker 4: like the point of being alive.
Speaker 2: No, No, actually, the point of being alive is buying
Speaker 2: goods and services from our advertisers. I don't know if
Speaker 2: you knew this. I think you thought it was about
Speaker 2: seeking joy, but it's actually about filling the gaping mall
Speaker 2: at the center of your life with products like these ones.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Okay, So obviously people have a problem
Speaker 2: with this man who's been dead since the fifties, and
Speaker 2: therefore I'm mad at this institute that keeps track of
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff over the years, like an archive.
Speaker 2: What do they when they try to pull state funding
Speaker 2: from you? How does that impact you? You were saying
Speaker 2: that that's like not you know, does it primarily impact
Speaker 2: you because everyone's suddenly aware of and mad at you again,
Speaker 2: or does it actually also like is it going to
Speaker 2: cut your funding? Like what's happening.
Speaker 3: So what's happening is there's now a I don't want
Speaker 3: to say like a disagreement, but there's a there's people
Speaker 3: trying to figure out how to be compliant with this law,
Speaker 3: which means that they need to go into certain administrative
Speaker 3: burdens to prove that we don't get these fonts. Okay,
Speaker 3: that's really all that it is. Otherwise we are pretty
Speaker 3: good standing. It's it's more so at least now. The
Speaker 3: board of Trustie's voted on Friday and they basically brought
Speaker 3: in the president's recommendation of do not separate us from
Speaker 3: the from the university, and so that happened on Friday,
Speaker 3: March first was the day that that went through. So
Speaker 3: we are all feeling pretty good. We all kind of
Speaker 3: had a little bit of a not so much a
Speaker 3: victory lap, but like a we've been hearing this for
Speaker 3: the last six months of worrying about what's going to
Speaker 3: happen to this place that we all love and that
Speaker 3: carries so many things because of the librarians who are
Speaker 3: around in the artifice. Who are around aren't the people
Speaker 3: handling the collection, And the legislature later decides, I, you
Speaker 3: in a university can't hold anything that is obscene.
Speaker 4: I scene is you know I have the beholder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could easily mean that this, like six hundred
Speaker 3: thousand artifacts that we hold in our collections are gone
Speaker 3: and we have stuff that spans two thousand years. It's
Speaker 3: not just items that are around today, and everything that
Speaker 3: we get is donated. We don't buy any of the
Speaker 3: items per secon People just mail them to.
Speaker 2: Us, the kind of things that normally if you mail
Speaker 2: to someone you might get in trouble.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, and that was kind of the people still
Speaker 3: think they're going to get in trouble.
Speaker 4: Yeah, kind of the point.
Speaker 3: Like I've heard that people have like shipped porn in
Speaker 3: cereal boxes as a way to like hide them because
Speaker 3: they're still worried that the Comstock law is around in
Speaker 3: a way that will make these items be destroyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, okay, Oh, there's so many parts of this
Speaker 2: that I want to talk about. I actually thought about
Speaker 2: this because I mailed a book from the Kinsey Institute
Speaker 2: to someone last week, and as I was packaging it up,
Speaker 2: I was thinking to myself, this used to be a crime,
Speaker 2: the Comstock laws. For anyone who's curious, there was this
Speaker 2: historical pervert named Comstock, And by that I mean he
Speaker 2: was the largest collector of porn of his era who
Speaker 2: was on a wild crusade against perversion and birth control
Speaker 2: and all of these things, and he went around and
Speaker 2: stopped people. He got all these laws passed that he
Speaker 2: can't pass pornographic materials through the US.
Speaker 3: Maile.
Speaker 2: That was like his big contribution to society, besides ruining
Speaker 2: an awful lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again,
Speaker 2: like the ghost of the comstock laws. Do you want
Speaker 2: to talk about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have book bans happening within libraries. I honestly,
Speaker 3: I am not positive what is happening within Indiana libraries.
Speaker 4: But there is a.
Speaker 3: Group of I would say parent groups, but I don't
Speaker 3: even know that they're actually still parents of children. It's
Speaker 3: usually like women in their mid fifties and later who
Speaker 3: are running for superintendent or the school board whatever, and
Speaker 3: now coming up with these ways that children can't interact
Speaker 3: with items that maybe have never been illegal in the past,
Speaker 3: so to speak. Like if any book mentions sex of
Speaker 3: any kind, right, it can't be around. If anyone is
Speaker 3: homosexual in any of the books, it's banned in their eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know a majority of our books are a
Speaker 3: lot of those things.
Speaker 2: I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there if you
Speaker 2: look really hard.
Speaker 3: Well. I today I was in the reading room that
Speaker 3: we have and we had out the It was called
Speaker 3: the like Wild Edibles of the Eastern North America, And
Speaker 3: it was a book written by Alfred Kinsey because he
Speaker 3: was a he.
Speaker 4: Was like an eagle scout, yeah, like loved nature.
Speaker 2: He was one of the first eagle scouts.
Speaker 4: Actually, yeah, you know more about him than I too.
Speaker 2: I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction.
Speaker 3: But a lot of those groups, like Moms for Liberty,
Speaker 3: they're the ones who are like a big crusade right now.
Speaker 3: When I first started, we just got a statue installed
Speaker 3: behind our building of Alfred Kinsey, and that is kind
Speaker 3: of when the majority of the threats that we would
Speaker 3: get started. Okay, when they start talking about this statue.
Speaker 3: I have talked to people that have worked here for
Speaker 3: twenty years and they have said they've never seen threats
Speaker 3: come in like this ever before.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's people talking about like bombing the statue, calls
Speaker 3: about you know, being a sexual predator, a deviant, or
Speaker 3: you know, you guys should all die, and it's very
Speaker 3: directed at us, right, It's it's less of being directed
Speaker 3: at like a random abstract thing.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: We have gotten a lot of harassment in terms of
Speaker 3: like people who because they think, oh, you do sex research,
Speaker 3: so you want a picture of my dick?
Speaker 2: So interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that will happen at times.
Speaker 2: You all should do an exhibit of the dick pics
Speaker 2: that have been donated so kindly to your institution and
Speaker 2: the individuals who work for it, are are a rating
Speaker 2: system underneath.
Speaker 3: I'm sure a curator, a compassman will love that. We
Speaker 3: actually just got in donated to us was the Cynthia
Speaker 3: plaster Casters, her Dick molds that she did of the
Speaker 3: in the eighties. She's like a famous groupieka like rock stars.
Speaker 3: So we have like Jimmy Hendrick's keenis whoa you know,
Speaker 3: bronze mold and that's the next big exhibition that's supposed
Speaker 3: to happen. But we also have like Jello Biafra whow Okay,
Speaker 3: it's hilarious.
Speaker 2: Would you all get never mind? I was thinking abou
Speaker 2: how you all can make some money?
Speaker 4: Lots of people are thinking of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, huh well no, it's okay. So it's so
Speaker 2: interesting to me, right because it seems like their attempt
Speaker 2: to shut you down legislatively was a swing and a miss. Right.
Speaker 2: It was this thing that they they thought that they
Speaker 2: had this thing that they're like, haha, we're going to
Speaker 2: get those perverts by cutting off their funding. And then
Speaker 2: everyone was like, well, that's not where the funding comes from.
Speaker 2: And the university was like we kind of like this place.
Speaker 2: It's been around for seventy seven years. It's literally the
Speaker 2: only reason anyone outside of Indiana has ever heard of us. Yeah,
Speaker 2: is that kind.
Speaker 3: Of a that's definitely the vibe we had like a
Speaker 3: series of listening sessions with the higher administration of like
Speaker 3: the public, well the university public coming in and just
Speaker 3: basically a lot of them saying the Kinzians too.
Speaker 4: Is the only reason why I came to Ium.
Speaker 3: The fact that this is here allows me to do
Speaker 3: my research, even if their research is in like Eastern European.
Speaker 4: You know, like faberge Eggs.
Speaker 3: Right, So it gives people a chance to see that
Speaker 3: like academic freedom and like freedom to research what you
Speaker 3: want is possible, and not just possible, but like encouraged. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: as an R one university, we should be doing we
Speaker 3: should be researching things that aren't or taboo at times, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and are actually trying to help the world rather than
Speaker 3: making money for.
Speaker 4: Some investor somewhere.
Speaker 2: Right, No, because that seems like the entire point of academia, right, Academia. Okay,
Speaker 2: this is really interesting to me because I have kind
Speaker 2: of a bit of a love hate relationship with academia,
Speaker 2: and you know, there's a lot of critiques that can
Speaker 2: be laid at sort of ivory tower and locking away
Speaker 2: information and things. But yet as we enter this sort
Speaker 2: of anti intellectual time that is absolutely a right wing
Speaker 2: culture war thing is to be anti intellectual and in
Speaker 2: this case, specifically shut down the academy's ability to preserve
Speaker 2: and transfer knowledge. Like, the problem from my point of
Speaker 2: view is that when there are limits to how well
Speaker 2: the information can be transferred, Rather than the right wing
Speaker 2: anti intellectualism, well, I anti intellectualism broadly, I'm not trying
Speaker 2: to make a case for any other kind of it
Speaker 2: is a problem with the actual gi existence of this knowledge, right,
Speaker 2: It's this like forbidden knowledge that no one should know
Speaker 2: that thirty seven percent of men in the nineteen forties
Speaker 2: like got a handy, you know exactly.
Speaker 3: The weird thing is that our collections are literally open
Speaker 3: to anyone who wants to come. We don't need to
Speaker 3: test it in any way. Well, yeah, that happens often,
Speaker 3: which to me is great and is kind of hard
Speaker 3: to come across in any archive. Usually, if you have
Speaker 3: an archive, like you need to have an affiliation with
Speaker 3: a university or a company in order to come and
Speaker 3: look at some of these things. Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 3: mean that's not to say that like anyone comes in
Speaker 3: and they are doing lude things like there we talk
Speaker 3: with everyone that comes in, right, there's there's no mystery happening.
Speaker 3: Really okay, there's no sex dungeon. I was a little
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, it's really boring. It's just a beige
Speaker 3: hallway for the most part.
Speaker 2: But you know what isn't boring that I have to
Speaker 2: interject quickly is supporting by like I'm never bored while
Speaker 2: I'm in the process of exchanging little pictures of dead
Speaker 2: people for products and services like the ones that support
Speaker 2: this podcast. And we're back, and I feel really guilty
Speaker 2: for literally cutting you off mid sentence in order to
Speaker 2: do that. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: It's weird to be on the other side of this
Speaker 3: to actually see do that. Yeah, one of the big
Speaker 3: things that happened when I first started was Bloomington has
Speaker 3: a big pride. Bloomington as a whole is what they
Speaker 3: call like a blue pocket and the rest of the
Speaker 3: red the sea of red of Indiana. But I've also
Speaker 3: heard people say, like, you know, like Indiana went to
Speaker 3: Obama in two thousand and eight, like it's not as
Speaker 3: red as.
Speaker 4: People really think it is.
Speaker 3: Right, it's that like it just came out today that
Speaker 3: we're like the fiftieth in voter turnout.
Speaker 2: WHOA, that's bad. That's really sad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but people are so disheartened, Like it feels it's
Speaker 3: really hard when these people are yelling about how conservative
Speaker 3: Indiana is constantly that it gets in everyone's head that, oh,
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter that what I do, which I love hate. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I have a love hate relationship with voting, but I
Speaker 3: also understand that, like I kind of need to in
Speaker 3: this capacity of where I am right because it really
Speaker 3: can change on a dime.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: I think my my personal representative, he was elected by
Speaker 3: like eleven votes, and he is a horrible, horrible man.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I when I get his fucking mailers that
Speaker 3: just say some dumb shit about trans laws, and I
Speaker 3: just go, I can't with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get pissed because cowboy hat and his mailers.
Speaker 4: No, but he looks Okay, ye, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: There's no cowboys where I live. It's the mountains. Take
Speaker 2: off the cowboy hat and put on a real tree
Speaker 2: baseball cap like everyone else in this town. Poser Okay,
Speaker 2: sorry anyway, uh huh.
Speaker 3: So a lot of what's going on is that people
Speaker 3: think that Indiana is super right wing. And as someone
Speaker 3: who's who came here from the East Coast, like, I
Speaker 3: love it here, Like it's really beauty full in Indiana. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I like not being around a lot of people. Bloomington
Speaker 3: says that there it's a really small town, but it
Speaker 3: really is like eighty thousand people when the students aren't here,
Speaker 3: which is still.
Speaker 4: To me a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it is small.
Speaker 3: Comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast, right. But everyone
Speaker 3: I've met here, I will say, there's great organizers that
Speaker 3: live here.
Speaker 4: There's a great.
Speaker 3: Amount of community and just like building of coalitions between
Speaker 3: people that I haven't really seen elsewhere, Okay, which is
Speaker 3: really important. And it's not just through the university, which
Speaker 3: I think is most people will think it's all here,
Speaker 3: But there's so many people outside of the university that
Speaker 3: do amazing work that maybe came here to go to
Speaker 3: school but ended up staying, or just came here because
Speaker 3: this used to be like the folk punk capital.
Speaker 2: That's true. That is whatever when I was going to Bloomington,
Speaker 2: that is what everyone asked. No one asked me about
Speaker 2: the Kinsey Institute everyone asked me about folk punk. Yeah,
Speaker 2: my interests align more to the Kinsey Institute person. No
Speaker 2: one get mad at me. Well, okay, so it's interesting.
Speaker 2: So in my mind, you're like, oh, okay, the right
Speaker 2: wing came for the kinsianstudent and they just failed, right,
Speaker 2: And is that missing the fact that you had a
Speaker 2: lot of organizers and a lot of people working to
Speaker 2: defend the Kinsey Institute.
Speaker 3: I think so I wouldn't even say that it was
Speaker 3: a failure. It was more of they really don't understand
Speaker 3: what we do and even how these institutions work. I
Speaker 3: think is the real thing is that they are so
Speaker 3: cut up in how things should work. They don't actually
Speaker 3: look into how like neoliberalism is everywhere and it is.
Speaker 3: I don't think they understand what that is and how
Speaker 3: much it's infected, how bureaucratic everything is, and how everything
Speaker 3: is interconnected constantly.
Speaker 2: So that's why they thought tax money would be the thing,
Speaker 2: But it's actually this complicated capitalist system.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, maybe if they listen to some other
Speaker 3: people and they're about capitalism, they would probably get more,
Speaker 3: you know, more people to come behind them. But for
Speaker 3: the most part, the folks who are are loud and.
Speaker 4: Proud about that.
Speaker 3: They they don't know what we do. They don't know
Speaker 3: who we are either. They think they do.
Speaker 2: Good since they're trying to murder you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the director got docked the first year I was here.
Speaker 3: That was fun, and there was a protest with some
Speaker 3: three percenters on campus. And we work very closely with
Speaker 3: Bloomington Pridle out of the time, and so there's always
Speaker 3: the worry of people showing up there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But again, like I said, like everyone here is there's
Speaker 3: so many good organizers that they've kept this town safe
Speaker 3: for so long, and I think they'll continue to do that.
Speaker 2: That's cool. I like when we learn and when we
Speaker 2: reinforce the fact that the thing that keeps us safe
Speaker 2: is organizing and is like community organizing and getting people
Speaker 2: together to keep track of what's going on and counter it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the big things that we focus on in
Speaker 3: terms of like our research goals is well being.
Speaker 4: And that's always something that has stuck with me.
Speaker 3: Because to me, the well being is us keeping each
Speaker 3: other safe. And I remember when this all first happened.
Speaker 3: I remember talking to the director and just being like,
Speaker 3: those people aren't going to help us.
Speaker 4: We are going to help each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 4: We are.
Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, we're not, Like we kind of can't
Speaker 3: count on everyone else sometimes these big institutions, because we
Speaker 3: know what we're doing, but they maybe don't know what
Speaker 3: we're doing, and maybe it's time that we just tell
Speaker 3: more people about it.
Speaker 2: I like that. I also like that it specifically points
Speaker 2: out that they did right by hiring a diy punk
Speaker 2: into their institution.
Speaker 3: You know. I yeah, I get a lot of weird
Speaker 3: flat but not being an academic right, But then it
Speaker 3: comes to things like this and it's like, oh, I
Speaker 3: always hear like, well we made their choice, yeah, which
Speaker 3: is it is nice to feel unfortunately in a job.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, that makes some sense if people want to
Speaker 2: support you all as individuals who are facing this trouble,
Speaker 2: or the Kinsey Institute in general, or even just like,
Speaker 2: if you have advice for people who are stuck engaging
Speaker 2: in the culture war more directly because they don't live
Speaker 2: on the coasts, what would you what would you say?
Speaker 2: How can people support.
Speaker 3: To support each other. We have a nice queer sports
Speaker 3: league here, and I suggest playing kickball with your friends.
Speaker 3: It's been really cool, and also doing a honky tonk night.
Speaker 3: That's our big, our big thing.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: I'm really proud of everyone that has put that stuff
Speaker 3: together because it has created a world that has brings
Speaker 3: people from all different parts together of the town.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: For the institute, if you want to go to Kinsey
Speaker 3: Institute dot org. That is kind of where you can
Speaker 3: see everything. You can support us by coming and learning
Speaker 3: more about sexual research and your history because it's all
Speaker 3: of our history in terms of learning about how people
Speaker 3: lived and how we have like the most mundane things. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we talked about Hirschfeld earlier. We have a scrap book
Speaker 3: of his and that is like the oldest thing of his.
Speaker 3: That's like his personal item that we have, Yeah, along
Speaker 3: with like published items, but that's like the big thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was almost fifty when he started the institute.
Speaker 2: I think I'm like kind of doing the math in
Speaker 2: my head really quickly because he was born in the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century. Yeah, Okay, Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: coming on and talking about this stuff. I'm so glad
Speaker 2: that this didn't you know, when we first talked about this,
Speaker 2: we didn't know which way the vote was going to go.
Speaker 2: I'm glad to do a little bit of a celebratory
Speaker 2: talk about this important institution. And yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you, And if you want to follow, hear me more.
Speaker 2: I have a different podcast. It's Cool People Did cool stuff,
Speaker 2: and it's also on cool Zone Media, which is the
Speaker 2: thing you're listening to right now. I hope you all
Speaker 2: are doing as well as you can with everything that's
Speaker 2: going on and putting each other back together again. We're
Speaker 2: all no, I'm not even gonna close with a humpty
Speaker 2: dumpty metaphor. I'm just done.
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