Whitney Strub (wstrub at gmail dot com)
This is an informal Internet CV; I’m happy to send a full formal one, as well as a pdf of any of the journal articles, to anyone who wants one (many linked or attached below).
Books
Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (Columbia University Press, 2011; paperback, August 2013)
–reviewed in What Makes It Great (hey, why not lead with this?), H-Histsex, American Historical Review (perhaps my favorite review), Journal of American Studies (a nice review despite a rather daunting essay title), H-1960s (for want of a nail, my shoe was lost!), Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of American History, Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History Newsletter, Journal of Women’s History
Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (University Press of Kansas, September 2013)
–reviewed in Wall Street Journal (!), Journal of American Studies, Library Journal, Choice
Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), co-edited with the awesome Carolyn Bronstein
–reviewed in Journal of American History; Gay & Lesbian Review; Journal of the History of Sexuality; Porn Studies; featured in roundtable at Notches: Part 1, Part 2; Part 3; made it into Timeout-New York Things to Do section when I gave a talk at New York Public Library, that was cool!
ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay, co-edited with Peter Alilunas (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Other Writing
2023
“Sleazy Honesty” (with Peter Alilunas), ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay, eds. Alilunas and Strub (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 1-25
“Roberta Findlay vs. Porn Studies” (with Peter Alilunas and Roberta Findlay), ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay, eds. Alilunas and Strub (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 191-212
“History of Smut: On Kelsy Burke’s The Pornography Wars,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2023
2022
“In New Jersey, Activists Are Learning What ‘Abolish ICE’ Means in the Biden Era,” Jacobin, July 2022
“Remembering Jeffrey Escoffier, Queer Socialist Pioneer,” Jacobin, May 2022
“Mutual Aid in the Time of Rebellion: With No One to Help Us (1967),” The Newarker, April 2022
“Sex Miseducation,” The Baffler, February 2022
Book reviews:
The Fear of Child Sexuality: Young People, Sex, and Agency, by Steven Angelides, Journal of the History of Sexuality 31.2 (2022): 262-264
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens: Contesting Femininity in the World’s Playground, by Laurie A. Greene, New Jersey Studies 8.1 (2022): 362-364
“Pornography beyond the Marketplace” (review of Lisa Sigel, The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America), American Historical Review 127.2 (2022): 955-957
2021
“Porno Dialectics at Work” (review of Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism), New Labor Forum 30.3 (2021): 113-116
“Sanitizing Halsted,” video essay for LA Plays Itself: The Fred Halsted Collection blu-ray (Altered Innocence), December 2021
“Book Banning Has a Long and Homophobic History,” Star-Ledger, December 2021
“The Newark History Missing from ‘Many Saints’” (with Mary Rizzo), Washington Post, October 2021
“New Jersey Hasn’t Defeated ICE Yet,” The Nation, September 2021
“How to Remember the 1970s,” Physique Pictorial, Summer 2021, 32-39
“Constructing the Pornographic Object of Knowledge: A Conversation between Whitney Strub and Jeffrey Escoffier,” Notches, August 2021
“Hardcore Wishman,” ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman, eds, Alicia Kozma and Finley Freibert (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 67-77
“The Comstock Apparatus” (co-authored with Jeffrey Escoffier and Jeffrey Patrick Colgan), Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History, eds. Margot Canaday, Nancy Cott, and Robert Self (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 41-63
Book reviews:
Dirty Books and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman, by Susan G. Davis, Journal of the History of Sexuality 30.2 (2021): 314-16
Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s, by Katie Batza, Journal of American Studies 55.1 (2021): 199-200
2020
“Trans Porn Genealogy beyond the Queer Canon: Kim Christy, Joey Silvera, and the Hetero-Industrial Production of Transsexuality,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7.2 (2020): 174-191
“Obscenity,” Routledge History of American Sexuality, eds. Kevin Murphy, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin (Routledge, 2020), 234-242
“New Jersey’s unique political contours make challenging immigrant detention hard” (with Mary Rizzo), Washington Post, December 2020
“Hudson County should end the horror of ICE detainment. Don’t renew the contract” (with Marlene Nava Ramos), Star-Ledger, November 2020
Star Spangled to Death review, Screen Slate, November 2020
“Should democratic socialists endorse Joe Biden?” (with Jorge Maldonado), Star-Ledger, May 2020
“Never Again Means Don’t Stop” (with Maya Handa), Commune, March 2020
Shakedown review, Screen Slate, March 2020
Book reviews:
Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema, by David Church, Sexualities 23.1-2 (2020): 110-11
The War on Sex, eds. David Halperin and Trevor Hoppe, Journal of the History of Sexuality 29.1 (2020): 112-15
2019
“Sanitizing the Seventies: Pornography, Home Video, and the Editing of Sexual Memory” Feminist Media Histories 5.2 (2019): 19-48
“Note to Essex County Democrats: You Can’t Resist ICE and Take Money from It to Do Its Dirty Work, Too,” Blue Jersey, April 2019
“New Jersey is Addicted to ICE,” The Nation, March 2019
“N.J. has a rich socialist history – and future,” Star-Ledger, January 2019 (published as “I’m a socialist and historian, socialism is blooming again in N.J.-this time in the age of Trump,” NJ.com)
Book reviews:
Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, by David Johnson, New England Quarterly 92.4 (2019): 692-95
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, by C. Riley Snorton, Journal of American History 105.4 (2019): 981-82
True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, by Emily Skidmore, American Historical Review 124.1 (2019): 253-54
Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940, by Julio Capó Jr., Journal of the History of Sexuality 28.1 (2019): 150-52
2018
“No Sex in Newark: Postindustrial Erotics at the Intersection of Urban and Adult Film History,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58.1 (2018): 175-181
“Gay Liberation (1963-1980),” The Routledge History of Queer America, ed. Don Romesburg (Routledge, 2018), 82-94
“Modernizing Decency: Citizens for Decent Literature and Covert Catholic Activism in Cold War America,” Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States, eds. Bethany Moreton, Heather White, and Gillian Frank (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 133-151
“Stop fighting yesterday’s porn wars,” La Crosse Tribune, December 2018
“Mayor Baraka, Oppose ICE in Washington and Also At Home” (with Mary Rizzo), TAPintoNewark, September 2018
“The silent deception of Newark’s ‘sanctuary city’ status” (with Mary Rizzo), ThinkProgress, September 2018
“A Requiem for a Porn Movie House,” Star-Ledger, July 2018 (published as “This little porn movie house learned to survive for decades—until last week,” NJ.com)
“Pornography and Urban Erotics in Newark,” In Media Res, June 2018
2017
“Sex Wishes and Virgin Dreams: Zebedy Colt’s Reactionary Queer Heterosmut and the Elusive Porn Archive,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23.3 (2017): 359-390
“Bacchanale (John Amero and Lem Amero 1970),” Porn Studies 4.3 (2017): 263-271
“Heat Wave: The Memphis Deep Throat Trials and Sexual Politics in the 1970s,” Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture, ed. Trent Brown (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 86-112
“Pornography, Heteronormativity, and the Genealogy of New Right Sexual Citizenship in the United States,” Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States: Conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s, eds. Anna von der Goltz and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 339-355
“Remembering One Eleven Wines, a Pre-Stonewall Win Against Homophobic State Surveillance” (with Tim Stewart-Winter), Slate, November 2017
“Hugh Hefner’s safe sex” (with Carolyn Bronstein), Washington Post, September 2017
“Why Libraries Need to Archive Porn,” Vice, February 2017
Page 99 Test, guest post, January 2017
Book reviews:
Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham, by Emily Bingham, Journal of the History of Sexuality 26.3 (2017): 521-23
Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960, by Charles Tepperman, Canadian Journal of History 52.2 (2017): 376-78
2016
“The Homophile is a Sexual Being: Wallace de Ortega Maxey’s Pulp Theology and Gay Activism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25.2 (2016): 323-353
“From Porno Chic to Porno Bleak: Representing the Urban Crisis in 1970s American Pornography” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars, eds. Strub and Bronstein (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 27-52
“Introduction,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars (co-written with Carolyn Bronstein), 1-23
“In Hispanic Heritage Month, Let’s Remember Gay Rights Pioneer Tony Segura,” Slate, October 2016
“Francomania Exposed!: Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco by Stephen Thrower,” Senses of Cinema, September 2016
“Can New Jersey’s Last Porn Theater Survive Gentrification?” Vice, June 2016
“How N.J.’s LGBT-friendly clubs have long strived for safety,” op-ed for Star-Ledger (co-written with Tim Stewart-Winter), NJ.com, June 2016
“Utah and the war on porn: Our long national history of condemning ‘obscenity’ as public enemy #1,” Salon, April 2016
Book reviews:
Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, by Jennifer Tyburczy, Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History Newsletter 30.2 (2016): 16-18
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, by Mireille Miller-Young, Journal of the History of Sexuality 25.3 (2016): 534-36
A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, by Andrew Hartman, Journal of American History 102.4 (2016): 1271-2
Feelings Women’s Liberation, by Victoria Hesford, Journal of the History of Sexuality 25.1 (2016): 177-79
2015
“The Baraka Film Archive: The Lost, Unmade, and Unseen Film Work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka,” Black Camera 7.1 (2015): 273-287
“Indexing Desire: The Gay Male Pornographic Video Collection as Affective Archive,” Out of the Closet, Into the Archive: Researching Sexual Histories, eds. Amy Stone and Jaime Cantrell (SUNY Press, 2015), 125-147
“Queer Smut, Queer Rights,” in New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, eds. Lynn Comella and Shira Tarrant (Praeger, 2015), 147-164
“Merry XXX-Mas: A brief history of Yuletide smut,” Salon, Christmas 2015 (co-written with Laura Helen Marks)
“How Playboy skirted the anti-porn crusade of the 1950s,” The Conversation, October 2015
2014
“A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project,” QED 1.2 (2014): 1-14 (co-written with Darnell Moore, Beryl Satter, and Timothy Stewart-Winter)
“The New Right’s Antigay Backlash,” for Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, eds. Leila Rupp and Susan Freeman (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 265-278
“Hey Look Me Over: The Films of Pat Rocco,” Free to Love: Cinema of the Sexual Revolution, ed. Jesse Pires (Philadelphia: International House, 2014), 72-85
“Moms at the Myth” (with Mary Rizzo), Public History Commons, October 2014
“Queer Sex in the Archives: ‘Canonizing Homophile Respectability,'” Notches, October 2014
“Recovering the New-Ark: Amiri Baraka’s Lost Chronicle of Black Power in Newark, 1968,” Bright Lights Film Journal, April 2014
“Meet the spiritual father of conservatives’ War on Women” (essay about Charles Keating and Citizens for Decent Literature), Salon, 31 April 2014
“Queer Newark,” OutHistory.org, March 2014 (with Tim Stewart-Winter)
Writers Read guest post, Jan. 2014 (and also Jan. 2011); again August 2017
Book review: How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, by Leigh Ann Wheeler, Journal of American History 100.4 (2014): 1274-75
2013
“Slouching Towards Roth: Obscenity and the Supreme Court, 1945-1957,” Journal of Supreme Court History 38.2 (2013): 121-138
“Historicizing Pulp: Gay Male Pulp and the Narrativization of Queer Cultural History,” in Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker, eds., 1960s Gay Paperback Originals: The Misplaced Heritage (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 43-77
“Challenging the Anti-Pleasure League: Physique Pictorial and the Cultivation of Gay Politics,” Activism in Modern United States Print Culture, ed. Rachel Schreiber, (Ashgate, 2013), 161-77
“Target Smut: In Search of a Lost Anti-porn Classic,” Temple of Schlock, December 2013
My Book, The Movie guest post, Nov. 2013
Book reviews:
Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, by Thomas Maier, Journal of the History of Sexuality 22.2 (2013): 349-51
Gay Artists and Modern American Culture: An Imaginary Conspiracy, by Michael Sherry, Material Culture 45.1 (2013): 56-58
2012
“Mondo Rocco: Mapping Gay Los Angeles Sexual Geography in the Late-1960s Films of Pat Rocco,” Radical History Review 113 (Spring 2012): 13-34
“The Politics of Porn, 2012,” Part 1, Columbia University Press Blog, December 2012
–Part 2: “The Culture (Non-)Wars”
Book reviews:
Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History, eds. Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History Newsletter 27.1 (Fall 2012): 15-16
Elly Peterson: “Mother” of the Moderates, by Sara Fitzhugh, Michigan Historical Review 38.2 (Fall 2012): 131-132
Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, by Carrie Pitzulo, Journal of American History 98.4 (March 2012): 1205
Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, by Josh Sides, Southern California Quarterly 93.4 (2012): 508-511
2011
“Censorship in Film,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern History, vol. 18: Media, eds. Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 38-41
“The Toynbee Tiles: Viral exhibitry from the pre-Internet world,” (co-written with Mary Rizzo) Public History Commons, November 2011
Book review: Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage, by Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, H-Net, September 2011
2010
“Lavender, Menaced: Lesbianism, Obscenity Law, and the Feminist Antipornography Movement,” Journal of Women’s History 22.2 (June 2010): 83-107
Book reviews:
Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television, by Elana Levine, Journal of the History of Sexuality 19.2 (May 2010): 347-351
Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights, by C. Todd White, Southern California Quarterly 92.3 (Fall 2010): 312-315
2009
Book reviews:
The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court, by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond Haberski, Jr., Journal of American History 96.3 (December 2009): 75
Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915-1966, by Gerald Butters, Jr., Law & History Review 27.2 (Summer 2009): 469-470
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, by David K. Johnson, Journal of Cold War Studies 11.2 (Spring 2009): 158-160
Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915-1981, by Laura Wittern-Keller, Journal of Popular Culture 42.2 (Spring 2009): 394-396
Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, by William Deverell, Material Culture 41.1 (Spring 2009): 89-92
2008
“The Clearly Obscene and the Queerly Obscene: Heteronormativity and Obscenity in Cold War Los Angeles,” American Quarterly 60.2 (June 2008): 373-398
“Further into the Right: The Ever-Expanding Historiography of the U.S. New Right,” Journal of Social History 42.1 (Fall 2008): 175-186
Book reviews:
Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s, by Linda España-Maram, Southern California Quarterly 90.3 (Fall 2008): 335-338
Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, by Daniel Hurewitz, Southern California Quarterly 90.1 (Spring 2008): 100-102
2007
“Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis,” Journal of Social History 40.3 (Spring 2007): 685-715
Book review: Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980, by Kimberly Springer, Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1.1 (Spring 2007): 135-137
2006
“Perversion for Profit: Citizens for Decent Literature and the Arousal of an Antiporn Public in the 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.2 (May 2006): 258-291
“Vice’s Devices: The Sexual Politics of Obscenity in Postwar Los Angeles,” in Film and Sexual Politics: A Critical Reader, ed. Kylo-Patrick Hart (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 84-102
“Let Them Eat Porn,” Bad Subjects 75 (2006)
2005
Book review: Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America, by Lee Grieveson, Directions in Cultural History 21 (2005): 122-127
Hack music writer, Stylus, 2005-07 (lots and lots of Guided by Voices-related stuff, but emphasis on the hack part)
Staff writer, PopMatters, 2005-07 (note: I underrated Bob Pollard’s Normal Happiness, probably because I was living in Miami and very sad)
Media and Interviews
“The Last Porno Screened in New Jersey,” UnderUnderstood podcast, August 2019
“Whitney Strub on the Philology of Pornography,” Ipse Dixit podcast,hosted by Brian L. Frye, May 2019
Anna Orso, “College students want to fight rape culture with a porn filter. But are the two related?” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 2018
Lynn Comella, “How Hollywood Transformed Downtown Newark into a Seedy 1980s Sex District,” Forbes, October 2018
Sex Out Loud, hosted by Tristan Taormino, VoiceAmerica, October 2018
—also May 2014
Rebecca Panico, “Essex Freeholders Consider Future of ICE Contract After Denouncing Agency’s Spokesman,” TAP into Newark, October 2018
Porno Cultures Podcast, November 2017
–excerpted in Aca-Media, podcast of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, “There’s More to Newark Than Whole Foods”
Mark Hay, “Republicans are Coming for Your Porn,” Vice, April 2017
Josh Israel, “Republicans will try to bring back the ‘War on Porn,’” ThinkProgress, January 2017
Interviewee, discussing the Queer Newark Oral History Project, One-on-One with Steve Adubato, December 2016
Talking head for National Geographic Channel’s Original Sin: Sex series, summer 2016
“This is What Americans Used to Consider Obscene,” Time, June 2016
“Sex Talk: Invited Scholars Assess Impact of Alfred Kinsey 1916,” Bowdoin News, May 2016
“A State Between–A Symposium on New Jersey Urbanism,” Princeton School of Architecture, May 2015 (filmed panel and discussion; I’m representing the Queer Newark Oral History Project)
“Five Things We Learned at the NYC Porn Film Festival,” Brokelyn, March 2015
NJ Porn Binge thing, NJ101, Feb. 2015
“Amiri Baraka’s lost Newark film, found and coming home,” Star-Ledger, April 2014
Short radio interview about The New-Ark, WBGO, Newark Public Radio, April 2014
Interview at Critical Margins, by Hope Leman, March 2014
Let’s Consider the Source, hosted by Bob Mann, Sirius/XM satellite radio, 23 March 2014
“International House explores the sexual cinema revolution,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 2014
Sex with Timaree, hosted by Timaree Schmit, podcast, November 2013
Interview at Columbia University Press Blog, May 2011
Lincoln Avenue, hosted by Professor Sherry Linkon, WYSU in Youngstown, Ohio, April 2009
Other Stuff I’m Involved With
Queer Newark Oral History Project (I keep a bibliography and work on a timeline of queer club history)
OMGcatrevolution: tumblr devoted to images of cats in radical cinema (well, sometimes “radical *cough*” cinema…)
strublog 