The Mann Act protected women from “human vultures who fatten on the shame of innocent young girls.”
Tag: 20th Century US History
Bad Girls: A Student Interview with Amanda Littauer
Bad Girls details how young women and girls in the 1940s and 1950s pursued new sexual freedoms.
Syphilis Onstage: Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods
Brieux’s plot featured a main character wrestling with the physical and social ramifications of syphilis.
Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights
Interview by David K. Johnson Historians who study sexuality in the 20th century United States have largely worked from the premise that secular forces shaped the formation of sexual identities, communities and regulation. Religion, in this paradigm, is framed as a residual and conservative force—the province of the fanatical and the ignorant. […]
Archives of Desire: Analog Sexting
My grandparents helped pave the way for virtual trysts.
Archives of Desire: Soft-Core Pornography and Activism in the 1960s
The Los Angeles Advocate captured the essence of an important segment of the LGBTQ culture.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the History of Sexuality
Gillian Frank Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States. To reflect upon Dr. King’s life, legacy and influence, NOTCHES offers some primary sources with which to begin thinking about King’s place in the history of sexuality. Even as historians are increasingly reckoning with King’s complicated private life, King’s views on […]
