Sex in the Archives

Sex in the Archives
Excerpt from Cornell Magazine
March/April 1997

Kroch library has one of the world's most important human sexuality collections, with enough pornography to make Hugh Hefner blush. Is it scholarship—or smut?

By Paul Cody

Cameras are watching and recording everything, three stories below the earth. You look up from your table in the secure reading room of Kroch Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections. You can feel the cameras, their invisible eyes taking it all in. You feel strangely guilty. There's a middle-aged man with an English accent two tables ahead, looking at a parchment written in what looks like some lost language. A woman is just in front of you, her eyes on an illuminated, leather-bound book that must be 600 years old. She wears black. Could she be a nun?

"...sepia photographs from the turn of the century of men and men, and women and men, doing things without clothes on that they didn't talk about back then..."

Next door is the vault, roughly one and a half times the size of a basketball court, where the treasures are kept—the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand, a first folio of Shakespeare, letters and papers of William Wordsworth, James Joyce, and George Bernard Shaw. There are more than 300,000 rare books and millions of manuscript pages, photographs, paintings, and prints. Ezra Cornell's safe is there, and so are dozens of letters from schoolchildren, some written in crayon, to the author of Charlotte's Web. But you're not here for E. B. White. The vault is carefully protected from dust, moisture, and the slightest variation in the constant temperature of sixty-eight degrees. More cameras, as well as motion detectors, monitor everything and everyone that comes in or out. At a table behind you, on the other side of the aisle, there's a young woman, her dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She's looking through stacks of papers and taking notes. She has a high, pale, intelligent forehead. A graduate student, perhaps? In Icelandic literature? In architecture? At the table in front of her, just across the aisle from you, is a dean. You know him slightly. He nods, leans over. "What're you working on?" he whispers.

The other scholars look up. You fold your arms over the pictures and books and magazines laid out on the table in front of you. They include: sepia photographs from the turn of the century of men and men, and women and men, doing things without clothes on that they didn't talk about back then; a magazine with a latex glove taped to a page ("Fun things to do with latex gloves," it says: "Dyke power," it says; "Go, girl, go"). There are articles on "Building a Better Bungee Bondage Board," "The Shocking Art of Electrical Torment"; Boyland, Hombre, Chain Male, and Naturama magazines; a transvestite world directory; thousands of photographs, in eye-popping color. The scholars are looking at you. The dean is smiling. "The Human Sexuality Collection," you say.