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Sex with the
Sound On
When Curtis Boyd remembers offering abortions before Roe v. Wade,
he emphasizes his patients’ sheer determination. One of the first
abortions he performed was for a poor white woman in her late teens
from East Texas. Wearing a feed-sack dress and makeshift sandals,
she came to Boyd when she was eight weeks pregnant. “I need you
to do me an abortion,” she said. Curtis told her the procedure was
illegal. “Don’t matter—you got to do me one,” she responded. Despite
his initial trepidation, Curtis became resolved. “I’m going to do it,” he
thought to himself. The following morning, he admitted the young
woman to the emergency room, claiming that she had an incomplete,
spontaneous misca
iage. Curtis performed a dilation and curettage
without issue. He asked the patient to come back to his office a few
days later, but he never saw her again.1
Gillian Frank, Saniya Lee Ghanoui,
and Lauren Jae Gutterman
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SEX WITH THE SOUND ON692 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Reading these words on the page offers a window into the past. But
hearing Curtis’s recollections in his own voice opens the door to a qual-
itatively different reckoning with the historical record.
In “A Sacred Calling,” the podcast episode of Sexing History pro-
duced in collaboration with the American Historical Review, we tell
the story of Curtis and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, Curtis’s wife, who have
provided abortion care since the 1960s in the face of increasing vio-
lence from the antiabortion movement. Through oral histories with the
Boyds, archival sound, and thematic music, “A Sacred Calling” uncovers
a deep history of faith and love through a complex legal landscape of
abortion access.
Sexing History—a podcast that explores how the history of sexuality
shapes our present—is a collaboratively produced, methodologically
igorous, deeply researched, and tightly scripted podcast that aims to
share usable pasts with our listeners. Sexing History launched in 2017.
Although our team has evolved over the years to include many assis-
tant producers and research assistants, Gillian Frank and Lauren Jae
Gutterman have been the cohosts from the beginning, and Saniya Lee
Ghanoui and Rebecca Davis have continued to serve as editors and pro-
ducers.2 We all have a research interest in the histories of gender and
sexuality in the contemporary United States. We also share a deep com-
mitment to publicly engaged scholarship and to the digital humanities.
Before coming to Sexing History, we had gained collective experience
working on a range of digital history endeavors, including the LGBTQ
MediaWiki website OutHistory.org; the international history of sex-
uality blog NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality; and
SourceLab, a research collective and online journal established by the
Department of History at the University of Illinois U
ana-Cham-
paign. But none of us had created a podcast or attempted to tell history
through an audio medium before.
Our project is overtly presentist. Over the past six years, Sexing His-
tory has produced twenty episodes, covering topics including abortion
access, African American midwifery and Black maternal mortality, gay
ights, trans identity and health care, AIDS activism, and struggles
against rape and sexual harassment. The
eadth of our episodes speaks
to our team’s capacious research interests and the contemporary sexual
politics that provoke our intellectual inquiries. We share these histories
ecause sexual politics is of urgent national importance, shaping both
electoral outcomes and everyday lives. At its best, historical thinking
can be an act of empathy encouraging identification with and under-
standing of different people and the social forces that shape their lives.
In that spirit, we use this podcast to reach a wide and intellectually curi-
ous audience and to help our listeners develop a critical understanding
of the history of sexuality and its connection to today.
1 Curtis Boyd, interview with
Gillian Frank and Lauren Jae
Gutterman, Fe
uary 7, 2022.
2 Throughout Sexing History’s
four seasons, Devin McGeehan
Muchmore, Jayne Swift,
Mallory Szymanski, Isabel
Machado, Chris Babits, and
Stephen Col
ook have served
as assistant producers. Alexie
Glover, Katherine Kenny, Hugh
Mac Neill, Ian McCabe, Emily
Vaughan, Felix Yeung, and
Caroline Azdell have served as
esearch assistants and interns.
Frontis: Curtis and Glenna
Halvorson-Boyd. Courtesy of
Glenna Halvorson-Boyd
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Podcasts are an ideal way to reach people beyond
the academy who care about history and who want
to better understand the roots of our cu
ent cultural
and political moment.
As of this writing, historians are heatedly debating the value and
scholarly merit of different forms of historical production, deliber-
ating how blogs and other forms of online and digital content should
e weighed against single-authored monographs. Digital history ini-
tiatives like Sexing History connect academic scholarship with public
audiences, disseminating not only research but also the tools that are
so critical to our discipline: examining evidence to critically analyze
provenance, intent, meaning, and application. At a time when mis- and
disinformation have become ubiquitous, historians’ research and inter-
pretive skills are of vital importance to the public, and digital methods
can help us translate scholarship for those beyond the academic world.
From our vantage point, then, as scholars situated within and outside
the academy, and as historians who utilize multiple mediums for shar-
ing our research, we maintain that our academic discipline is richer and
more powerful when it encourages and values multiple modes of dis-
seminating knowledge and engaging with varied audiences. Echoing
the American Historical Association’s recently approved Guidelines
for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship, we also believe
that public-facing work, including digital history endeavors, should be
given greater weight and consideration in processes of hiring, tenure,
and promotion. Our experiences working on Sexing History lead us to
ask not whether digital history counts as “real” history but rather what
we can gain analytically and methodologically, experientially and prac-
tically, when we do the history of sexuality in a sonic space.
The popularity of history podcasts like Revisionist History, Slow
Burn, and You Must Remember This confirms that there is a widespread
hunger for historical analysis and na
atives from listeners within and
outside academia. When we began Sexing History, there was a dearth
of podcasts exploring the history of sexuality in the United States. The
few podcasts that ventured into our field did so with sporadic episodes
of varying quality. Most were created by nonspecialists who veered
toward sensationalism rather than careful storytelling and research. At
the same time, the growing accessibility of recording hardware, mixing
software, and online distribution platforms has made it possible to cre-
ate and disseminate high-quality multitrack recordings from virtually
anywhere. The moderate learning curve required to use this hardware
and software means that historians have the ability to reach audiences
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esearch-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/fe
uary-2023/guidelines-for-
oadening-the-definition-of-historical-scholarship
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esearch-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/fe
uary-2023/guidelines-for-
oadening-the-definition-of-historical-scholarship
SEX WITH THE SOUND ON694 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
far beyond college and university campuses. This convergence of
technological availability; popular demand for historical analysis; and
widespread interest in issues of contraception, sexual expression, and
LGBTQ identities created an opportunity for us to share our craft and
expertise with wide audiences.
As with any digital history project, our approach to Sexing His-
tory has evolved over seasons. Our earlier episodes featured audio re-
creations and interviews with historians. We quickly learned, how-
ever, that these features detracted from the na
ative arc and that
sonic archives best served to illustrate the histories, augmented by
ackground music and first-person accounts. As such, we chose to
make a podcast that relies heavily on archival audio clips and oral his-
tory–centered storytelling. Over the years, we have also sharpened our
production skills and strengthened our ability to write engaging and
streamlined historical na
atives for a public audience. We have become
more comfortable and more adept at using microphones and digital
ecording and editing software like Audacity. The public recognition,
audience base, and body of work we have built have also made it easier
to convince individuals to share their stories or their personal archives
with us.
Of course, some aspects of our work have remained the same. As
we
ainstorm topics for potential episodes and determine their via-
ility, our organizing questions are always “What archival recordings
are available to compellingly present our story?” and “Which his-
torical actors can we interview to augment these archival sources?”
Each Sexing History episode weaves together archival recordings,
oral histories, and period-appropriate music into the interpretive
frameworks offered by the podcasts’ cohosts. In doing this work, we
have become increasingly aware of the ways that historians’ reliance
on print media shapes the stories we tell. Working in an auditory
medium has shifted not only how we do history but also which his-
tories we decide to spotlight.
Each episode is a collaborative affair, and our team starts with a
series of questions that we outline on a specific topic. These lines
of inquiry ignite our research as we dig into traditional secondary
and primary sources, such as newspapers, co
espondence, and legal
archives. At the same time, we begin our conversations about what
the episode will sound like and who can tell the story. We have found
that many people want to tell their stories, and oral histories layer in
critical personal elements to the histories we tell. For example, we
have interviewed She
i Chessen, whose fight to secure a therapeu-
tic abortion before Roe helped to transform public attitudes toward
abortion; we have talked with multiple flight attendants who orga-
nized against sexual harassment in the 1970s; and we have spoken
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#AHRHISTORYLAB 695JUNE 2023
with former workers at a bar in Roanoke, Virginia, that became one of
the first in the nation to feature topless dancers in the 1960s. Like any
good piece of writing, our scripts go through an extended process
of development. After
ainstorming and conducting research and
oral history interviews, we jointly draft the script and put it through
ounds of edits and revisions, noting where oral history clips will
augment the argument and what type of music could serve as back-
ground. We then record the episode—often editing the text further
for “speakability”—before moving to postproduction mixing, clean-
ing, and distribution.
Our team mines rich, and largely untapped, audio archives that
historians too often ignore. Finding and recovering archival sounds
equires the resourcefulness and research skills that are central to
our discipline. We comb through holdings of traditional archival
epositories and request or make digital copies of select recordings.
We scour WorldCat and use interli
ary loan to access LPs, cas-
settes, CDs, and video recordings in hopes of finding useful audio.
We also tap into the growing online digital holdings of li
aries
and crowdsourced collections including YouTube, Vimeo, and the
Internet Archive. Our episodes have featured archival gems such as
a rare 1980s phone sex recording from the National Archives. This
ecording of 6969 Fantasy Palace’s answering message outlines the
different sexual pleasures awaiting callers at various phone exten-
sions (e.g., “lusty lasses,” “kinky surprise,” etc.), revealing callers’
ote sexual fantasies as well as the humor and camp sensibility
that often underlay the industry. Other exceptional archival audio
finds include a 1977 Psychology Today interview with overlooked
folk singer and transgender cele
ity Canary Conn. The interview
eveals how Conn struggled to convey her life story and to educate
the public about trans identity within a medicalized and sensation-
alistic media gaze.
Other audio material has come to us directly. We reach out to
individuals and families involved with historical events who have
often been willing to share their personal materials with us. Our
episode “Mama Was a Star” featured never-before-heard songs
of a 1960s comedian, Ruth Wallis, from her son’s private archive.
Wallis’s songs and performances included sexually suggestive lyr-
ics, and she appeared in supper clubs and hotel shows across the
world. Her son, in possession of her audio archive, reached out to
Sexing History offering us access. Podcasting presented the per-
fect medium for Wallis’s story. Her bawdy lyrics, sultry voice, and
playful presence could not be thoroughly communicated via writ-
ten text alone. We paired her private written