It Could Happen Here - The Kinsey Institute, and Sexual Research, Under Attack

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. 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 king's 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 in 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 through 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 Montanez, 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 1919 to 1933. So, they called it the Institute for Sexual Wissenschaft. History sometimes remembers it as Hirschfeld's Institute, after Magnus Hirschfeld, the director of it. For 14 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 1930.

They worked alongside pro-homosexual advocacy groups. Germany led the Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the 1920s and early 1930s. 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 anytime someone wants to say something like, the Nazis are bad, they burned books. What usually goes unsaid when this photo is reproduced is what books those Nazis were burning. They were burning the Institute. is what books those Nazis were burning. They were burning the Institute. On May 6, 1933, Nazis burned around 20,000 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 40,000 people during that book burning. So ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first trans woman 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 on to 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 1947, a bisexual polyamorous sexologist named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his own institute for sex research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, 77 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 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and 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 37% of men had had, quote, overt homosexual experience to orgasm, which shocked the hell out of the world. Well, it probably shocked about 67% 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 2020s, 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 1001, 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 40

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 sure so i started back in early 2022 as kind of the person who was spearheading the 75th 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. Cause, cause it's all about having your own initiative and working with 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 finished my degree there, dropped out because of financial issues, of course, as that's what happens when you're in college. Yeah. 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 so that if I have 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. The Kinsey Institute is such a monolith, such a thing that has existed for so long. It's hard for me to imagine people being really mad at it. Like 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 uh 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 uh they someone larissa sweet is her name the uh the representative who uh proposed this basically decided to say kensington 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 money. 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 upkeep 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 work 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 the big thing is that there is a lot of misinformation about Alfred Kinsey and his first book, The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male. And there is a table within it of Dr. Kinsey. When he did his research, he interviewed people. 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 12, 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 there ages in there that were younger than anyone that is conservative 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 it's 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 he had when he did his work because people didn't want to believe that anyone was having premarital sex, uh, that anyone was a homosexual and it was normal or that anyone, any woman, uh,

enjoy sex. Right. Because it's, it's for one thing only. Right. So they looked at this chart that said five-year-olds experience sexual attraction and said, he's interviewing five-year-olds experience sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five-year-olds

is that basically or or rather that he was doing experiments on five-year-olds they think that his work is like physical because he is a zoologist right biologist by nature and i'm gonna 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 this, I was expecting to find like op-eds from the 50s or something, but I'm finding things from 2023 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 a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he was around for and that's like meant to mean that he's 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 he I don't know he just 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. But like,

who doesn't? That's like the point of being alive. 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. review show where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens.

So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every

week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

And we're back. And we're back. Okay. So obviously people have a problem with this man who's been dead since the fifties and therefore are mad at this Institute that keeps track of a lot of stuff over the years, like an archive. What are 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, is it, 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? What's happening? So what's happening is there's now a disagreement.

But 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 funds. Okay. That's really all that it is. Otherwise, we are pretty good standing. It's more so, at least now, the Board of Trustees voted on Friday and they basically brought in the president's recommendation of do not separate us from the university. And so that happened on Friday. March 1st 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 carrying 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 if the librarians who are around and the archivists who are around aren't the people handling the collection and the legislature later decides iu university can't hold anything that is obscene and obscene is you know i have the beholder, it could easily mean that this 600,000 artifacts that we hold in our collections are gone. And we have stuff that spans 2,000 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 se. 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... And people still think they're going to get in trouble. Yeah. Kind of the point.

I've heard that people have shipped porn in cereal boxes as a way to 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 wasade against perversion and birth control and all of these things. And he went around and stopped people. He got all these laws passed that you can't pass pornographic materials through the US mail. 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 am not positive what is happening within Indiana libraries, but there is a group of, let's 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-50s 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 a 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 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 do. I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction. more about him than I do. 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 when they started talking about this statue i have talked to people that have worked here for like 20 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 i get calls about you know being a sexual predator or a deviant or you know you guys should all die and 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 a exhibit of the dick pics that have been donated so kindly to your institution and the individuals who work for it are uh like a rating system underneath i'm sure our curator rebecca passman will love that we actually just got in um donated to us was the cynthia casters, her dick molds that she did of the, in the eighties.

She's like a famous groupie. Okay. Like rock stars. So we have like Jimi Hendrix. Penis. Wow. You know, bronze mold.

And that's the next big exhibition that's supposed to happen. But we also have like jello Bafra. Okay. It's hilarious. Would you all get. Never mind. i was thinking about how y'all could make some money lots of people are thinking about 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 gonna 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 77 years it's literally the only reason anyone outside of ind 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 Kinsey Institute is the only reason why I came to IU. The Kinsey Institute is the only reason why I came to IU.

The fact that this is here allows me to do my research, even if their research is in like Eastern European, you know, like Fabergé 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 r1 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 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 the, when there are limits to how well the information can be transferred, rather than the right-wing anti-intellectualism, well, anti-intellectualism broadly, I'm not trying to make a case for any other kind of it, is a problem with the actual existence of this knowledge, right?

It's this like forbidden knowledge that no one should know that 37% of men in the 1940s, 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 mean to test it in any way. Well,

yeah, that happens often. Yeah. 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 a affiliation with a university or a company in order to come and look at some of these things yeah yeah i mean that's not to say that like anyone comes in and they are doing lewd things like they're 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 disappointed. 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. The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their

journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast,

Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting

if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

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 okay. It's weird to be on the other side of this to actually see you 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 in the rest of the the red the sea of red of indiana but i've also heard people say like you know like uh indiana went to obama in in 2008 like the 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 50th in voter turnout whoa that's bad that's impressive but yeah 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 have a love hate yeah i have a love hate relationship with voting but right 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. I think my personal representative, he was elected by like 11 votes. Wow. And he is a horrible, horrible man. Yeah.

Yeah, and I can't, 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. Yeah. Because everyone that I know yeah because he wore a cowboy hat in his mailers no but he looks like he should get those yeah okay yeah that makes sense there's no cowboys where i live it's the mountains you 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 beautiful in indiana yeah i like not being around a lot of people bloomington says that they're it's a really small town, but it really is like 80,000 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. 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 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 what everyone asked. No one asked me about the Kinsey Institute. Everyone asked me about folk, uh, folk punk. Yeah.

My interests align more to the Kinsey Institute person. No one get mad at me. Well, okay. So what's interesting is, so in my mind, you're like, oh,

okay. The right wing came for the Kinsey Institute 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 they are so caught 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 okay i mean maybe if they listen to some some other people and they're talking about capitalism they would probably get more yeah 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 yeah they think they do good since they're trying to murder you yeah the director got doxxed the first year I was here.

That was fun. Yeah, that's fun. And there was a protest with some three percenters on campus, and we work very closely with Bloomington Pride a lot of the time. And so there's always the worry of people showing up there. Yeah. But again, like I said, 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 wellbeing. And that's always something that like has stuck with me because to me, the wellbeing 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. I was 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 flack for 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 the right choice yeah which is nice to feel yeah unfortunately in a job yeah no that that makes some sense if people want to support you all as individuals who are facing this uh trouble or the kin 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 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 great. And also doing a honky-tonk night.

That's our big thing. Cool. I'm really proud of everyone that has put that stuff together because it has created a world that brings people from all different parts together of the town. Yeah. For the Institute, if you want to go to kinseyinstitute.org, that is kind of where you can see everything. 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 uh we talked about Hirschfeld earlier we have a scrapbook of his and that is like the oldest thing of his that is like his personal

item that we have yeah along with like published items but that's like the big thing yeah he was almost 50 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 19th century yeah okay well i 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 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, a little bit of a celebratory talk about this important institution. And yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. And if you want to 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 because we're all... No, I'm not even going to close with a Humpty Dumpty metaphor. I'm just done. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

in here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex and deeply entertaining podcast sniffy's cruising confessions join hosts gabe gonzalez and chris patterson rosso as they explore queer sex cruising relationships and culture in the new iheart podcast sniffy's cruising confessions sniffy's cruising confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals you You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.

Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle.

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