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BLOOD UNDER THE BRIDGE: REFLECTIONS ON “THINKING SEX” 37

I should reiterate that antifeminism was not one of my objectives. While the essay has sometimes been interpreted as a rejection of feminism, I saw it as completely within the best traditions of feminist discourse, particularly the con- stant self- critical striving toward more analytic clarity and descriptive precision about inequality and injustice. Unfortunately, as time erodes the details of context, such conversations, internal to feminism, are often seen as more oppositional than they were ever intended to be.70

Then there are the children. I clearly underestimated the size of the impending tsunami about the sexuality of the young. When I finished writing “Thinking Sex” in 1983, the outlines of the panics over children were clear, but their scale and duration were not.71 The panics that seemed episodic in 1983 now are a permanent feature of our social and political landscape. When the history of the last quarter of a century is finally written, one of the distinguishing features of this period will be the extent to which legitimate concerns for the sexual wel- fare of the young have been vehicles for political mobilizations and policies with consequences well beyond their explicit aims, some quite damaging to the young people they are supposed to help. The rhetoric of child protection has anchored many conservative agendas with respect to intensifying women’s subordinate sta- tus, reinforcing hierarchical family structures, curtailing gay citizenship, oppos- ing comprehensive sex education, limiting the availability of contraception, and restricting abortion, especially for young women and girls.

Laws and policies that are supposed to protect children have been used to deprive young people of age- appropriate and eagerly desired sexual information and services. Laws intended to protect children and young people, such as very broadly drawn child pornography statutes, have been used to prosecute them (such as the cases where minors have been charged with breaking the law by texting nude images of themselves). Almost anything, from promoting abstinence to ban- ning gay marriage and adoption, can be and has been framed as promoting chil- dren’s safety and welfare.72 A critical evaluation of the details, impact, and scope of child protection laws and policies is long overdue; yet people who try to engage in such analysis are often attacked and accused of supporting child abuse.

In the early 1980s one could still have a thoughtful discussion about the sexuality of the young. It has become increasingly perilous to address the many complex questions about children, sex, and minors that need to be thoroughly discussed and carefully vetted: these include what kind of sexual information, ser- vices, and behavior are appropriate for the young, and at what ages; what consti- tutes sexual abuse and how can it be prevented and minimized; how should young people learn about sex; what are the appropriate roles of adults in the sexual lives

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38 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

and learning of children; what kinds of representations of sexuality should be available to minors, and at what ages; should sexually active minors be treated in punitive ways, and where is the line between protection and punishment; in what ways do the policies, legal apparatus, and structures of fear that have been built over the last several decades enhance or damage the experience of growing up; what is pedophilia, and what is child molestation; who abuses children; what is child pornography; and for what offenses is someone labeled a “sex offender”? I do not have answers to all of these questions, but I think it is tragic that discussion of most of these questions has been reduced to a collection of crude sound bites, stereotypes, and scare tactics that have been cynically manipulated into stam- peding the public and politicians into many ill- considered changes that have not promoted safety or sound policies for minors.

One example is California’s 1994 initiative, Three Strikes and You’re Out. This law was passed in the emotional wake of a horrible crime: the abduction, rape, and murder of a young girl. But the law was an example of bait and switch: rather than protect young people from serial rapists, the primary effect of the law has been to incarcerate tens of thousands of Californians, many on relatively minor charges, including drug use and possession. Three Strikes has contributed to the out- of- control expansion of a vast prison gulag and diverted critical resources from other needs, including one of the most important for children: primary, secondary, and higher education.73

The fear of sexual abduction, rape, and murder of children by strangers has substantially reshaped many areas of society. It is a major concern of parents, and haunts the young. Yet it is relatively rare. According to Newsweek, more children drown in swimming pools each year than are abducted by strangers.74 By a large margin, the leading cause of fatalities among teenagers is automobile accidents.75 Yet most people are not terrified of cars, and few parents are as afraid of swim- ming pools as they are of “sex offenders,” ostensibly lurking behind every bush and lamppost. Despite the facts that most sex abuse is perpetrated at home and by family members, most murdered children are killed by their parents, and most kidnapped children are abducted by noncustodial parents, the family is depicted as a place of safety threatened by dangerous strangers. The ever- growing appara- tus of regulation and control adopted to address these issues is directed primarily toward such strangers. “Child protection” is a bit like the defense budget, the intelligence bureaucracy, and the endless wars on terror: there are genuine issues and real problems, but much of the response consists of uncontrolled institutional expansion, escalating expenditure of resources, poorly defined targets, and few effective ways to measure success.

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In her statement about her Barnard workshop on the sexuality of infancy and childhood, Kate Millett observed: “There is, in short, a great deal of sexual politics frustrating the sexual expression of children and the young. You and I will live to see this discussed, almost for the first time in history. Considering we were all children once, and if we are very good, we’re children still — we all have a stake in this. The emancipation of children is our emancipation in retrospect, and that of the future as well.”76 Millett’s comments (and some of mine in “Thinking Sex”) now seem hopelessly naive and unrealistically optimistic. But she was right to point out that all of us who have reached adulthood are former children. Much of my concern in these areas is a result of having grown up in the 1950s, when it was hazardous to be a sexually active female teenager.

Like most other girls, I had plenty of experience with both “pleasures and dangers.” I had to contend with my share of unwanted sex, but I also encountered many barriers to sex I wanted. Contraception was unavailable, abortion was ille- gal, and the stigmatization of sexually active young women was ferocious. Sex edu- cation in school consisted of a film about menstruation, enhanced by surreptitious reading of disreputable novels like The Catcher in the Rye and gleaning sexual terms from the rare unabridged copies of Webster’s dictionary. Getting pregnant was ruinous: when I was in high school, girls who got pregnant were summar- ily expelled. They lost their chance at further education and became social non- persons, at least in the universe visible to those of us who remained in school. Second- wave feminism was in part a reaction to this punitive regime. Social con- servatives, on the other hand, seek to reconstitute such a system, or something worse. They often justify their program as necessary to protect a sentimentalized notion of childhood innocence.

Writing “Thinking Sex,” I dimly saw the outlines of the shape of things to come, but badly miscalculated their reach, persistence, and consequences. My comments on sex and children were made in a different context, in which I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that no one would imagine that I supported the rape of prepubescents. Even now, as I write this, I am aware that whatever I say will be interpreted in the worst possible way by some antipornography advocate or right- winger, and misconstructions are inevitable. Children are not, in fact, a major area of my interest or expertise. But why should even an exploration of such issues need to be done so gingerly, and feel so dangerous? That it does is an indi- cation of something deeply wrong.

Issues of urban space have remained major and enduring areas of my research interest. The parts of “Thinking Sex” that are most germane to my cur- rent work are those that grew out of my ethnographic project on gay men in San

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Francisco, and I am even more focused now than I was then on topics such as geographies of sexual location, and the formation and dissipation of gay neighbor- hoods. While the term gentrification had been coined in the 1960s, the study of gentrification was just becoming a coherent field in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and there were only a handful of studies on the relationship of gay neighborhoods and populations to that emerging literature.77 I was not yet conversant with the early gentrification literature when I wrote “Thinking Sex.” My field research had made it clear, however, that the location of gay populations and institutions was enmeshed in conflicts over land use and that homosexuals were convenient scape- goats for the crisis in affordable housing in San Francisco.78

It was even more obvious that large redevelopment projects threatened existing gay enclaves and that sexual stigma was a readily exploitable resource for making land available for capital- intensive development. In 1984 I commented that areas such as Times Square in New York and San Francisco’s Tenderloin, North Beach, and South of Market were on the verge of being “made safe for convention centers, international hotels, corporate headquarters, and housing for the rich.”79 There is now a sizable literature on the transformation of Times Square, including Samuel Delany’s elegiac Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.80 In San Fran- cisco, the Tenderloin and North Beach have not yet been conquered, but South of Market, the location of my research, has been substantially rebuilt and socially reconstructed. Blocks that once housed maritime union halls and where gay men congregated are now the sites of luxury condominium towers. Moreover, the other gay neighborhoods of San Francisco from the 1960s and 1970s are either gone or shrinking. On rereading ”Thinking Sex,” I was surprised to see my observation that the gay neighborhoods that we could take for granted in the early 1980s might prove temporary.81 The attrition of urban gay concentrations in the early twenty- first century has become a serious challenge for gay social life and political aspi- rations, and its potential consequences have not yet been fully articulated.

One aspect of the essay of which I am most proud is its “protoqueerness.” I wanted to move the discussion of sexual politics beyond single issues and sin- gle constituencies, from women and lesbians and gay men to analyses that could incorporate and address with more intricacy the cross- identifications and mul- tiple subject positions that most of us occupy. I continue to believe that our best political hopes for the future lie in finding common ground and building coalitions based on mutual respect and appreciation of differences and that the best intel- lectual work is able to accommodate complexity, treasure nuance, and resist the temptations of dogma and oversimplification.

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Notes

Thanks to Bob Schoenberg and Ann Matter, and to the many departments and units at the University of Pennsylvania that supported the conference “Rethinking Sex.” Thanks to Steven Epstein, Sharon Holland, and Susan Stryker for their gracious and generous comments. Thanks especially to Heather Love, for having brought us all together, and for honoring my work. Thanks to Melanie Micir and Poulomi Saha for taking such good care of the logistics. For help on this essay, I am immensely grateful to Heather Love, Carole Vance, Claire Potter, Andrew McBride, and Valerie Traub.

1. See, e.g., B. Ruby Rich, “Is There Anything New under the Covers?” In These Times, February 20 – 26, 1985, 19. In “Review: Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s,” Fem- inist Studies 12 (1986): 525 – 61, Rich dismissed me without engaging at all with “Thinking Sex” in an essay covering several books, including Pleasure and Danger. In Sex, Power, and Pleasure (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1985), 17 – 18, 150 – 55, Mari- ana Valverde managed to dismiss “Thinking Sex” while using conceptual language (such as the “Domino Theory”) almost identical to mine, but without attribution. See also Elizabeth Wilson, “The Context of ‘Between Pleasure and Danger’: The Barnard Conference on Sexuality,” Feminist Review, no. 13 (1983): 35 – 41, although Wilson’s comments were based on the lecture rather than the published version. A welcome exception was Michèle Aina Barale’s thoughtful and engaged comments in “Review: Body Politic/Body Pleasured: Feminism’s Theories of Sexuality, a Review Essay,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 9 (1986): 80 – 89. Exemplary of the hostile reviews was Pauline B. Bart, “Review: Their Pleasure and Our Danger,” Contempo- rary Sociology 15 (1986): 832 – 35. See also Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: Women’s Press, 1990), 274; and Bat- Ami Bar On, “The Feminist Sexuality Debates and the Transformation of the Politi- cal,” in Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy, ed. Claudia Card (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 51 – 63.

2. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267 – 319.

3. See Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1984); 115, and Ellen Willis, “Who Is a Feminist? A Letter to Robin Morgan,” Village Voice, Literary Supplement, December 1982, 16 – 17.

4. The historian Jonathan Ned Katz coined this slogan, which now graces the Web site www.outhistory.org, a community- created, nonprofit site on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and heterosexual history.

5. “Welcome Statement,” “Rethinking Sex” conference brochure, www.sas.upenn.edu/ wstudies/rethinkingsex/.

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6. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Cen- tury to the Present (London: Longman, 1977). See also Bert Hansen, “The Historical Construction of Homosexuality,” Radical History Review 20 (Spring – Summer 1979): 66 – 75; Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” Radical History Review 20 (Spring – Summer 1979): 3 – 23.

7. This paradigm shift happened across a broad swath of researchers more or less simul- taneously. In addition to my own essay, see Judith Walkowitz and Daniel J. Walkow- itz, “ ‘We Are Not Beasts of the Field’: Prostitution and the Poor in Plymouth and Southampton under the Contagious Diseases Act,” Feminist Studies 1, nos. 3 – 4 (1973): 73 – 106; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Con- ceptualizing Sexuality in History”; Hansen, “The Historical Construction of Homo- sexuality”; Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Carole S. Vance, “Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality,” Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?, ed. Dennis Altman et al. (London: GMP Publishers, 1989), 13 – 34; Vance, “Anthropology Discovers Sexuality: A Theoretical Comment,” Social Science and Medicine 33 (1991): 875 – 84; Steven Epstein, “A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality,” in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. by Steven Seidman (Cam- bridge: Blackwell, 1996), 145 – 67; and Gayle Rubin, “Studying Sexual Subcultures: The Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America,” in Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, ed. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

8. Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences 6, nos. 2 – 3 (1994): 62 – 99.

9. Two key independent scholars were Jonathan Ned Katz and Allan Bérubé. See Jona- than Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976); Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper and Row, 1983); Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The His- tory of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990).

10. John D’Emilio, “Dreams Deferred: Part 1,” Body Politic 48 (1978): 19; D’Emilio, “Dreams Deferred: Part 2: Public Actions, Private Fears,” Body Politic 49 (1979): 24 – 29; Jim Steakley, “The Gay Movement in Germany Part One: 1860 – 1910,” Body Politic 9 (1973): 12 – 17; Steakley, “The Gay Movement in Germany Part Two: 1910 – 1933,” Body Politic 10 (1973): 14 – 19; Steakley, “Homosexuals and the Third Reich,” Body Politic 11 (1974): 1 – 3; Allan Bérubé, “The First Stonewall,” San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Program (1983), 27; Bérubé, “Behind the Spectre of San Francisco,” Body Politic 72 (1981): 25 – 27; and Bérubé, “Lesbian Masquerade,” Gay Community News, November 17, 1979. For more on Gay Commu- nity News, see Amy Hoffman’s wonderful memoir, An Army of Ex- Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).

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11. Allan Bérubé, “Coming Out Under Fire,” Mother Jones, February – March (1983), 45. 12. See John D’Emilio, “Allan Bérubé’s Gift to History,” Gay and Lesbian Review World-

wide 15, no. 3 (2008): 10 – 13. 13. Bérubé, “Lesbian Masquerade.” 14. Bérubé, “First Stonewall.” 15. Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire. 16. See Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age

Harlem,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1991), 318 – 31; and Garber, “Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues,” OUTLook: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly 1 (Spring 1998): 52 – 61.

17. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).

18. Carole S. Vance, “Invitation Letter” (September 1981), in Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, ed. Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson (New York: Faculty Press, 1982), 1.

19. Carole S. Vance, Epilogue to Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 434.

20. Carole S. Vance, “More Danger, More Pleasure: A Decade after the Barnard Sexual- ity Conference,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, 2nd ed., ed. Carole Vance (London: Pandora, 1992), xxii.

21. Vance, Epilogue, 434. In the epilogue, Vance introduced the terminology of “sex panic” rather than that of “moral panic,” which was used by Cohen, then Weeks, and me. See Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Oxford: Marin Roberton, 1980); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Soci- ety: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981): 14–15; and Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 297–98.

22. Vance, Diary, 47. 23. Cited in Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial,

1999), 314. 24. See the Diary; Vance, Epilogue; and Vance, “More Danger, More Pleasure.” 25. Vance, Epilogue, 433 – 34. 26. Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism, “We Protest.” Leaflet

distributed at Barnard Sex Conference, April 1981. From the author’s collection. 27. Carole S. Vance, “Letter to the Editor,” Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 589 – 91; and Ellen

Willis, “Letter to the Editor,” Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 592 – 94. 28. Ellen Willis, “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography,” in Beginning to See the Light:

Pieces of a Decade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981): 219 – 27. 29. Tacie Dejanikus, “Charges of Exclusion and McCarthyism at Barnard Conference,”

off our backs 12, no. 6 (1982): 5. 30. Dejanikus, “Charges of Exclusion and McCarthyism,” 5.

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31. Dorchen Leidholdt, “Back to Barnard,” off our backs 23 (Oct. 1993): 30. 32. Jane F. Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second- Wave Feminism and the Rewriting

of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 188.

33. Vance, Epilogue, 434. 34. Vance, “More Danger, More Pleasure,” xxi. 35. Jane Gould, Juggling: A Memoir of Work, Family, and Feminism (New York: Feminist

Press at the City University of New York, 1997), 200. 36. Gerhard, Desiring Revolution, 184. The actual members of the planning committee

were listed in the Diary and also in Pleasure and Danger (1984), xvii. 37. Gould, Juggling, 200. 38. Vance, Epilogue, 431 – 32. 39. Vance, personal communication, June 2010. 40. Andrea Dworkin, memo, circulated but unpublished, August 1981, author’s personal

collection, emphasis in the original. 41. Letters to the Editor, off our backs 12, no. 7 (1982): Rubin, 24, Hollibaugh, 25, Wal-

ton, 25, Newton, 25, Doughty, 26; 12, no. 8 (1982): Ellen Willis, 32, Joan Nestle, 32, Barbara Greer, 33; 12, no. 10 (1982): Samois, 26, Cleveland WAVAM, 26.

42. But see Feminist Anti- Censorship Taskforce et al., eds., Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship (East Haven, CT: Long River Books, 1992); Heresies: The Sex Issue 12 (1981); and Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dis- sent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995) for a useful chronology and incisive commentary.

43. See Laura Lederer, Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: Wil- liam Morrow, 1980). This is the most representative collection of essays from the early feminist antiporn movement.

44. MacKinnon mentioned pornography in passing in her 1982 and 1983 Signs articles, but did not become a prominent figure in the antiporn movement until the 1983 Min- neapolis ordinance. Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs 7.3 (Spring 1982): 515 – 44; and MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” Signs 8.4 (Summer 1983): 635 – 58. See also Gayle Rubin, “Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong: An Analysis of Anti- Pornography Politics,” in Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism, ed. Alison Assiter and Avedon Carol (Boulder, CO: Pluto, 1993), 18 – 40.

45. Diana E. H. Russell and Susan Griffin, “On Pornography: Two Feminists’ Perspec- tives,” Chrysalis 4 (1977): 11.

46. Russell and Griffin, “On Pornography,” 12. Russell appears to be unaware that the relative lack of explicit sex in some S/M films often resulted from attempts to avoid prosecution. The threshold of explicitness for bringing obscenity charges was often lower for S/M materials.

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47. Carole Vance has a particularly lucid analysis of the rhetorical tactics involved in such sexual “laundry lists” in an essay on the 1989 imbroglio over the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). (Carole Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” Art in America 78, [May 1990]: 49–55). In addition, one must be careful to under- stand how potentially loaded terms are used in antiporn literature, and how their meanings can slip. One example, found in the Russell passage cited here, is muti- lation. We generally think of mutilation as deliberate and terrible injury causing permanent physical damage, but mutilation is often used in antiporn texts to refer to practices of body modification such as genital piercing, nipple rings, or even tat- toos. In this context, one person’s idea of mutilation is another’s idea of personal adornment.

48. Russell and Griffin, “On Pornography,” 13. 49. See, for instance, Rubin, “Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong.” 50. WAVPM, “Who Are We?” Newspage, September 1977. 51. Newspage, November 1977, my emphasis. 52. Samois, ed., What Color Is Your Handkerchief? A Lesbian S/M Sexuality Reader

(Berkeley, CA: Samois, 1979) and the organization’s carefully worded statement of purpose printed on the last page of Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Les- bian S/M (Boston: Alyson, 1982). See also Gayle Rubin, “Samois,” in Encyclope- dia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America, ed. Marc Stein (New York: Scribner, 2004), 67 – 69; and Rubin, “The Leather Menace,” in Coming to Power, 194 – 229.

53. Pat Califia, “History of Samois,” in Coming to Power, 243 – 81. 54. Robin Linden et al., Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis (East Palo

Alto, CA: Frog in the Well, 1982). 55. Linda Williams traces “a major change taking place in American obscenity law and

the prosecution of sex crimes as they have moved away from the notion of explicit sex and toward the targeting of scapegoatable ‘deviants’ . . . in the definition of obscenity, explicitness has given way to the deviant sexuality of the ‘other,’ defined in relation to a presumed heterosexual, non- sadomasochistic norm that excludes both fellatio and cunnilingus.” (Williams, “Second Thoughts on Hard Core: American Obscenity Law and the Scapegoating of Deviance,” in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, and Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson [London: British Film Institute, 1993], 47, 49).

56. Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond, The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism (New York: Pergamon, 1989). See also Dorchen Leidholdt, “A Small Group,” off our backs 15, no. 10 (1985): 26; Nan Hunter, “Sex- Baiting and Dangerous Bedfellows,” off our backs 15, no. 7 (1985): 33; Hunter, “Modern McCarthyism,” off our backs 15, no. 11 (1985): 26; and Lisa Duggan, “The Binds That Divide,” off our backs 15, no. 11 (1985): 26.

57. Vance, “More Danger, More Pleasure,” xxi.

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58. Margaret Hunt, “Discord in the Happy Valley: Report of a Conference on Feminism, Sexuality, and Power,” Gay Community News 14, no. 21 (1986).

59. Meryl Fingrudt, “. . . An Organizer,” off our backs 17, no. 3 (1987): 24. 60. It was at this conference that I first met Eve Sedgwick. Eve’s paper was called “Spank-

ing and Poetry: Starting with the Fundamentals.” Eve too was attacked in some of the press coverage for ostensibly participating in the S/M conspiracy.

61. Multiple authors, “A Protest at the Emphasis of the Humanities Research Centre’s 1993 Conferences,” Australian National University, 9 March 1993, p. 1. See Sheila Jeffreys’s account in The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution (Melbourne: Spinifex, 1993), 95 – 97.

62. Barbara Farrelly, “ANU denies conferences showcase anti- feminism,” Sydney Observer, March 19, 1993.

63. Leidholdt and Raymond, Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism. 64. CATW campaigns against decriminalizing prostitution, supports the Mann Act, and

supports the federalization of antiprostitution enforcement. See action.web.ca/home/ catw/readingroom.shtml?x=113289; www.catwinternational.org/bioDorchenLeidholdt .php; action.web.ca/home/catw/readingroom.shtml?x=113289. Jeffreys is also cur- rently involved in feminist antitrafficking and antiprostitution activism. See Vance, this issue, and Rubin, “The Trouble with Trafficking: Afterthoughts on the Traffic in Women,” in Deviations: Essays in Sex, Gender, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

65. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 147.

66. For my comments on prostitution, see Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 286 – 87. 67. Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2008), 130 – 31. 68. Susan Stryker, “Thoughts on Transgender Feminism and the Barnard Conference on

Women,” Communication Review 11 (2008): 218. 69. Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She- Male (New York:

Teachers College Press, 1979). See also Penny House and Liza Cowan, “Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So! Transsexuals in the Women’s Movement,” Dyke, a Quarterly 5 (1977): 29 – 35. For responses to Raymond, see Sandy Stone, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein (New York: Routledge, 1991), 280 – 304; and Carol Riddell, Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire” (Liverpool, UK: News from Nowhere, 1980). Raymond has also moved into antiprostitution activism and was the co – executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) from 1994 to 2007.

70. In addition, the politics of the sex wars led some critics to claim that I had rejected feminism in attempts to discredit me and to bolster their argument that those who

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BLOOD UNDER THE BRIDGE: REFLECTIONS ON “THINKING SEX” 47

disagreed with the antipornography analysis were not feminists. See, for example, Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy, 128; and Anti- Climax, 274. For a contrasting assess- ment, see Annamarie Jagose’s careful and detailed discussion of the relationship of queer theory to feminism, in which she correctly notes that the gulf between queer theory and feminism has been exaggerated and comments that “Thinking Sex” was “a resolutely feminist intervention.” Jagose, “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism & Psychology 19, no. 2 (2009): 165.

71. Joel Best, Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child- Victims (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 23 – 24. See also Paula Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 335 – 71.

72. See Ann Burlein, Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Janice Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Pro- tecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

73. See The Legacy (dir. Michael J. Moore; 2006); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 2007); and Joe Domanick, Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America’s Golden State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

74. “What Should You Really Be Afraid Of?” Newsweek, May 24 – 31, 2010, 64. 75. Anna Quindlen, “Driving to the Funeral,” Newsweek, June 11, 2007, 80. 76. Vance, Diary, 59. 77. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1983), 138 – 72; and Manuel Castells and Karen Murphy, “Organization of San Francisco’s Gay Community,” in Norman. I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein, eds., Urban Policy Under Capitalism (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982), 237 – 59.

78. For the escalating costs of housing in the early 1980s, see Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, and P. Jefferson Armistead, “San Francisco: Urban Transformation and the Local State,” in Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelop- ment, Revised Edition, ed. Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Richard Child Hill, Dennis R. Judd and Michael Peter Smith (New York: Longman, 1986 [1983]), 202–44.

79. Rubin, Thinking Sex, 296 – 97. 80. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York Uni-

versity Press, 1999). Also on the development of Times Square, see Marilyn Adler Papayanis, “Sex and the Revanchist City: Zoning Out Pornography in New York,”

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Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 18 (2000): 341 – 53; and Bart Eeck- hout, “The Disneyfication of Times Square: Back to the Future?” in Critical Per- spectives on Urban Redevelopment, ed. Kevin Fox Gotham (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2001), 379 – 428.

81. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 296.

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