Best-selling author Susie Bright, the country’s preeminent feminist sex writer, will donate her archival materials and deliver her ‘Sexual State of the Union’ address at Cornell University on Wednesday, January 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Lewis Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
The donation and address kick off the 25th anniversary of Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection, which began a quarter of a century ago as the Cornell Library gathered books, letters, photographs and other ephemera related to sexuality — much of which was ignored or shunned by academia at the time of the collection’s conception.
Bright is a leading voice on sexual politics. She broke new ground publishing the lesbian sex magazine “On Our Backs” in the 1990s and remains on the cutting edge of publishing as an author, editor and podcaster.
“I’ve admired Cornell’s archives of GLBT history for years — really, it’s one of the world’s finest when it comes to sexual representation, and the range of erotic and sexual identity in full flower,” Bright said. “The ‘On Our Backs’ legacy — the hundreds of women we published who took such great risks, and our thousands of readers who had their lives changed by this vision of lesbian sexual self-determination — deserve the perfect spot.”
In her talk, the “Sexual State of the Union Address,” Bright will discuss the current status quo of sexuality in the nation’s bedrooms and courtrooms, from the most personal to the most global consequences.
Bright is giving Cornell her unique archives, which document sexual politics over the past 35 years. Her collection contains the written history of “On Our Backs” and rare museum objects, such as specially designed costumes the publishers wore at magazine fundraisers, as well as detailed documentation of the feminist sex wars and censorship battles that defined lesbian publishing in the ’80s and ’90s. Bright is also an expert on the history of the pornography business and its censorship, and she is donating priceless videos and documents that record the path of these controversies.
