Why librarians at Harvard and elsewhere are racing to save vintage porn

The Royalle archive includes everything from Royalle’s Femme line of adult films to her testimony during government obscenity investigations in the 1980s. It has videos of her Phil Donahue Show appearances, products from her sex toy line, and letters to fellow directors, friends, and family.

Once Royalle’s archive landed at the library, “There was a kind of flood” of sex and pornography-related materials to Schlesinger, Kamensky says, including papers from the late First Amendment advocate and adult film star Gloria Leonard.

But the collecting isn’t just at Harvard. As anti-porn laws sweep the United States, librarians and archivists across the country are vacuuming up the sexual ephemera from Americans’ pasts, trying to preserve the remnants of pre-internet pornography.

It’s all a relatively new development: In the 1960s, with the rise of the field of social history in academia, there was a turn across disciplines toward collecting materials from ordinary people and those who were less wealthy to study “history from the bottom up,” as the late historian Jesse Lemisch famously put it. But it’s only within the past decade that more institutions have been creating their own archives devoted to what once was nearly always thrown out.

“Sex archives are having a moment,” says Lynn Comella, a professor of gender and sexuality studies. She helped found the Sexual Entertainment and Economies collection at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which opened its doors earlier this year. “Sexual history is history, and this message is beginning to resonate more widely with people both in and outside the adult industry.”

The more recent collections — at Harvard’s Schlesinger library, UNLV, and the University of Toronto, which began building its Sexual Representation Collection around 2018 — join a few longstanding archives including Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection, which opened in 1988, and The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which dates to 1947.

Recently, Kinsey acquired the collection of the late Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton, an artist and self-described “recovering groupie” who made plaster molds of famous musicians’ penises, starting with Jimi Hendrix. (In the 2000s, Albritton began making molds of female musicians’ breasts as well.) Her collection was particularly rich: bronze casts and plaster molds, diaries, and her personal library of books.

Critics of such collections say public funds or tuition dollars shouldn’t be paying for them. Even Kinsey, the nation’s first major collection of sexual materials at a public university, has been on shaky ground. In May of last year, the institute was defunded by the Indiana Legislature for the first time since its founding more than seven decades ago, which means it now mostly has to rely on grants and donations.

“We’re in a place culturally right now where people are still weaponizing knowing about sex, knowing about our bodies,” says Kinsey curator Rebecca Fasman.

So what are the benefits of saving breast and penis casts — or such films as Bisexual Buggery (1969), Dr. Longpeter (1947), and The Foxy Fireman (1952), as Kinsey does? Why preserve Space Virgins (1984) and Debbie Does Dallas Part II (1981) as the Library of Congress does within its collection of more than 200 pornographic films?

“Without primary source materials on assorted sexual topics and populations and practices, there is no scholarship: only speculation and assumptions and prejudices and gossip,” says Gayle Rubin, an associate professor of anthropology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. When Rubin was studying leather culture in the gay community in San Francisco, she had to collect her own archives, which was common for sexuality scholars in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Rubin thinks that archives such as UNLV’s help researchers create “better, deeper, more evidence-based histories of queer and other sexual populations” than was possible a few decades ago.

UNLV has received some important donations, including the archives of Brian Gross, an adult industry publicist, and the records of Norma Jean Almodovar, who advocated for sex workers’ rights. Because of its small budget, Comella had to fund-raise for the collection’s launch in January. One of the donors: legal brothel The Chicken Ranch.

Porn is so prevalent now that it is probably having a greater effect on people than it did a century ago. For example, rough sex in porn has normalized the practice and may have contributed to the marked — and sometimes dangerous — increase in teens doing so in real life, according to surveys.

One of the questions porn archives can help answer is: Does pornography hold a mirror to our culture or does it shape it? Does it cause social and sexual problems or merely reflect those that already exist?

Comella, from UNLV, believes the answer to the question is both: porn reflects people’s desires and shapes them. Jackie Strano, cofounder of S.I.R. Video Productions, a lesbian porn company created in the 1990s, was working at San Francisco’s Good Vibrations sex toy shop (which has locations in Brookline and Harvard Square) and saw that more and more straight couples were coming in to ask about “pegging” (though the term wasn’t popularized by sex columnist Dan Savage until years later). With partner Shar Rednour, Strano went on to make an instructional film about it, Bend Over Boyfriend, as “a direct response to growing interest in a specific sexual practice,” says Comella. At the same time, the movie helped bring the practice “out of the closet and introduce it to more couples.” Strano’s records of the world of 1990s and early 2000s adult film are now at UNLV.

“Pornography often shows existing sexual interests,” adds Amanda Gesselman of the Kinsey Institute. “But pornography can also shape viewers’ future sexual interests because pornography introduces and normalizes different activities and roles that viewers may not have been exposed to before.”

Overall, the types of things we like to watch on screen mostly haven’t changed all that much from the 1920s. “Anything that can be seen today they were doing then, too — and sometimes in even more adventurous and boundary-pushing ways,” says Peter Alilunas, associate professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon and the author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video.

The first known instance of male-male penetration on film was in 1924′s Exclusive Sailor, says Patrick Keilty, former director of the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection. “There’s a long tradition of gay sailors.”

Keilty also cites examples of women being sexually empowered long before the sexual revolution, pointing to a 1940s video of a couple having sex that’s in Toronto’s Collection. “Her body language appears self-assured, relaxed, satisfied, and comfortable. There’s a casual way in which she seems in command and confident,” Keilty says.

What has changed is how we view the films, who is making them, and who has access to them.

In the early 1900s, porn was generally watched on celluloid films by groups of men in grind houses, secret basement viewing rooms. By the 1970s, it was viewed in public movie theaters by a wider crowd because by then, obscenity laws “are starting to come undone,” Keilty says. In the 1980s, porn films started being viewed in the home on TV, thanks to the advent of the VCR. Now, most of us have access to a full universe of porn on our smartphones.

The viewership spike is striking. In the 1970s, 45 percent of men and 28 percent of women ages 18-26 had seen an X-rated movie in the past year, according to an analysis of a General Social Survey. In 2008-2012, in the same age groups, 62 percent of men and 36 percent of women had. (Although respondents tend to underreport pornography viewing.)

The storytelling has changed too. In the early 1900s, most porn films were shorter and focused narrowly on sex acts, according to Alilunas.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, filmmakers evaded censorship by making “lab coat films.” In these movies, Keilty says, “Some doctor in a white lab coat comes out at the start of it and tells you why this film is educational.” But in the 1970s, when adult films were in movie theaters raking in millions, as Deep Throat did, they were longer and more narrative driven. (Deep Throat was among the early films to earn an X-rating, originally introduced to alert parents to the presence of violence or sex, but soon a selling point on its own.)

In the 1980s, the industry was dominated by lower-cost VHS. By the DVD era in the 1990s and 2000s, “There was a re-emergence of sophisticated stories and larger budgets,” Alilunas says. There’s one throughline “in the history of media technology and that’s the broad, steady, and widespread demand by people that it include sexually explicit material.” Now, the porn industry is dominated by cheap-to-record 10 minute clips on “tube sites” such as Pornhub.

Archives show the struggles women have always had in the porn industry, both as actors and directors, and they document the shift in the adult industry to more female directors making films, although the percentage remains small.

At Harvard, Schlesinger’s archives of iconic 1980s-era feminist porn stars show that while in some ways porn was a woman’s world — actresses were generally paid more than men per scene — in other ways it was firmly a patriarchal place: Actresses didn’t have much of a say about what they did on screen; films were nearly always directed in service of the male gaze.

Royalle’s archive charts the course of the industry from the 1970s so-called porno chic era of Deep Throat through the 1980s, when Royalle began her own production company, one of the first female-driven porn companies, focused on female sexual pleasure and foreplay.

Before Kamensky brought Royalle’s archive to Harvard, almost all of the pornography-related materials in the collection were the perspectives of anti-porn feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. So scholars who wanted to study pornography were met with one point of view: that of women who opposed it.

“We need to be able to study the difficult issues of women, gender, and sexuality from a 360 perspective,” says Kamensky, who recently published the biography Candida Royalle & the Sexual Revolution based on the collections at Harvard. With Royalle’s archive, “Now, you can assess that argument by looking [at] what women in the adult industry say about their own experience.”

Kamensky is primarily a historian of the American Revolution era, and she “had no intention” of writing about Royalle when her archive came in. But she decided to take a quick glance, she says. “From the first look at a randomly chosen diary from a randomly chosen box, it was clear that her life story did not fit any received narrative. So that it’s not a simple story of self-liberation and joy. And it’s also not a story only of victimization, and constraint,” Kamensky says. “[I saw] the potential for the material to redraw our narrative of the sexual revolution.”

Pornography also reflects and responds to world events. The University of Southern California’s archive of erotic physique photos and magazines gives a shifting account of what the ideal body was for gay men, librarian Michael C. Oliveira says. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the ideal male body was a thin one, but in the ‘80s, that changed. “You have HIV/AIDS hitting and people that are thin are probably sick, at least that’s what society feels,” Oliveira says. “And then all of a sudden you see people starting to bulk up, especially in the queer community.” That history is visible in porn.

KAMENSKY LEFT HARVARD earlier this year. But Schlesinger has been continuing to collect sex-related materials.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Schlesinger’s curator for gender and society, Jenny Gotwals, escorted me up a set of stairs to the third floor, where some unprocessed collections and archivists’ offices are. She pointed to “the AV graveyard,” a cubicle stuffed with a tape recorder, a gleaming silver reel-to-reel player with VHS and BETA tapes piled on top, a vintage film camera, and a boombox for CDs. A five-shelf metal bookcase holds rows of cardboard archival boxes. She showed me the collection of the newest sex-positive activist’s papers they’ve acquired: the records of Priscilla Alexander, who persuaded the National Organization of Women to form a committee on Prostitutes’ Rights. Among other achievements, Alexander spent four years at Geneva’s World Health Organization working on their Global Program on AIDS.

Gotwals directed me to Harvard’s other collection of porn, which is in Houghton Library, a repository of rare books and archives. There, I met curator Leslie A. Morris in her office, where a life mask of John Keats looks down from a shelf above her desk.

One problem she encounters is that few researchers or students know to look for pornographic material in Harvard’s collections, Morris says. When the library received a large recent donation of materials relating to sex and drug use, it staged an exhibition to alert people to the fact that it was available. Because, she says, “No one would associate this kind of material with Harvard.”

I asked Morris, who went to Catholic school, if she ever rejects materials for being too racy. “I don’t see it as my job to say, ‘this is too explicit,’” Morris says. “I mean, it is a reflection of a sexual practice that someone considers normal and enjoyable.” But she does sometimes have to pace herself. “I find I can’t look at a lot of this stuff for a long time, so I might spend half a day on it,” Morris says. “At times, I just don’t look too closely.”

Hallie Lieberman is a writer, sex historian, and the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy. Send comments to [email protected].