Each conversation with a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities serves as a gateway into a wonderful dimension of previously unknown information and experiences. Like mini planets that hang in the air around them, they have each constructed and uncovered different worlds of research that you can visit with a few probing questions.
It is the wish to visit one of these worlds that finds me sitting across from Gayle Rubin, a University of Michigan alum, DJ, and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's & Gender Studies. Over the course of an hour, I basked in her voice, letting her anecdotes about the twists and turns of her career in academia wash over me. With decades of experience behind her, she told me about her journeys through queer research and advocacy.
She began in 1966 as an undergrad here at the University of Michigan. She majored in an independent major of her own design, as there wasn’t a program in place to support it yet, and she called it Women’s Studies.
The queer spin to things started to take shape when a lesbian visited the Thursday Night Group, an early feminism group in Ann Arbor that Rubin was a part of. This got her gears turning, and it culminated in her own self-discovery.
The day after she came out, Rubin found herself at the library. She wanted to learn about lesbianism, but found only psychiatric writings that detailed the “disease” of homosexuality. With help from the librarians, she was pointed towards “deposits of material in the library that didn’t show up in the card catalog.” These were in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an M Library special collection where then-curator Ed Weber had amassed a unique collection of homophile publications here at Michigan.
Rubin stayed at the University of Michigan for graduate school, studying anthropology. Her dissertation focused on the gay leather population in San Francisco—a manuscript that she is currently revising. Here, she ran into the early anti-pornography movement. These groups touted that any woman that did not support the banning of pornography was not a feminist, and was actively assisting the degradation of women. Rubin was appalled by this movement, as many of the participants were ignorant of the history of obscenity regulations and their impact on women. Rubin explained that porn is not what subordinates women; it is the state, it is religion, it is the patriarchy, etcetera. As such, Rubin spent a lot of her time in San Francisco “in the trenches” and fighting against this topic that she considered dangerous.
These days, she is revisiting her time in San Francisco by researching and organizing what will one day become a book about the feminist sex wars, particularly the porn wars in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
As a teacher, Rubin focuses on social organizations around the issues of sex, gender, and/or queerness. One class she teaches is called Sex Panics, which discusses anti-prostitution, the Lavender Scare, the resurrection of the anti-gay movment in the 1980s, and other things. She also teaches Sex and the City, which explores how cities distribute sexual populations like gay men, sex workers, and others.
However, the class that she is most excited about is What is Marriage? It covers the history and origins of marital institutions in Western Europe and the US. Here, Rubin told me about when she and her partner were able to tie the knot after the legalization of gay marriage. Upon receiving the marriage certificate, she held it in her hands and realized that it looked the same as the death certificates that she had received for her two parents, with a raised seal and all. This struck her as really strange, which caused Rubin to start thinking about where all this came from.
When asked if there was any advice she would give to the students who are pursuing the same branch of LGBTQIA+ research and advocacy, Rubin said that everything is different now. She told me about how she “grew up in the teeth of the anti-gay 1950s.” Things got better over time, but now all the progress we’ve made is under assault. She said, “I don’t know what to tell people because we’re in a different world than the one I experienced. It’s a treacherous world. I’m relying on young people to take up the torches and keep the world a less horrible place.”
