When Forbes, an anthropology student, stumbled upon a museum dedicated to sex she hesitated to apply for a job. Twelve years later she proudly sports her title as Curator of Sex. Here she invites readers to travel from suburban garages where men and women build sex machines, to factories that make sex toys, to labyrinthine archives of erotica collectors. She asks readers to grapple with the same questions she did: when it comes to sex, what is good, bad, deviant, normal? Do such terms even apply? And, in our hyper-sexualized world, is it still possible to fall in love?

Museums have lengthy history, going back to the Renaissance Cabinets of Curiosity, and they are indices of changing fashions of perception insofar as the categories museum curators use to classify objects change over time. The major focus of Tyburczy s study is sexuality on display, which sets up, in turn, her investigation of the effects of museum display on the history of sexuality. Historical context for the museum is one of her themes (and how categories of normacly and perversity change over time), with another themes being the work of sex museums n redefining what sex means in the modern public sphere; she also folds in consideration of the pleasures and dangers of exhibiting marginalized sexual subjects (women, nonwhite races, LGBT individuals, and the like); last, she explores the paradox of asserting (as she does) that all museums are sex museums bodies move around and toward objects on display, they reshape the typical dances of museum-goers along with their preconscious motivations in visiting a museum. She proposes that explicit display or restagings of sexual artifacts provides new ways for approaching and understanding issues of desire, sexual identity, and sexual practices as they intersect with the history of the modern museum and with sexual history during the past two centuries. Her fieldwork sites are: the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, the Museum of Sex in New York, the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, and El Museo del Sexo in Mexico City. Such institutions allow Tyburczy to show how alternative sexuality (inclusive of kink, fetish, and sadomasochistic cultures) and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. There are plenty of cases here, in short, to keep the casual reader titillated and the erudite reader surprised."

Sex Museum is a retelling of various sexual rites and occurrences throughout history.

Wanting nothing more than to visit the Museum of Sex, Hannah goes out of her way to make the trip happen, but as with all the best laid plans, hers was met with one setback after another as she finds herself out of time, money and at the mercy of a sadistic man named Randal who gives her a crash course in all things kink. And when her ordeal finally comes to an end, she finds love in the strangest of places - the companion she’s kept closely hidden for the better part of six years.

First put on display together in 1985 by Monique van Made and her father, this collection of erotic works is exceptional for the quality of the objects exhibited, its engravings, and its photographs of yesteryear. Far from being a focus for voyeuristic prurience, the Museum is intended to be understood as a serious center for the history of erotic art.

Queering the Museum develops a queer analysis of the ways in which museums construct themselves, their core business, and their publics through the, often unconscious, use of inherited ways of knowing and doing. Providing a critique of both the practices and conventions associated with the modern public museum, and the ontological assumptions that inform them, the authors consider recent discourse around inclusion in museums and explore the ways this has been taken up in practice. Highlighting the limits of particular approaches to inclusion, and the failure to move away from a traditional museological paradigm, the book outlines an alternative critical museological approach that the authors refer to as ‘queer’. Providing readers with the critical tools necessary for a profound rethinking of museum practice, the book also responds to and problematises the growing call for social inclusion. Queering the Museum will appeal to academics, students, and museum and arts sector practitioners with an interest in critical theory or queer practice. It will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of museum studies, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies, media, social policy, politics, philosophy, and history.

In the Sex and Race series, first published in the 1940s, historian Joel Augustus Rogers questioned the concept of race, the origins of racial differentiation, and the root of the “color problem.” Rogers surmised that a large percentage of ethnic differences are the result of sociological factors and in these volumes he gathered what he called “the bran of history”—the uncollected, unexamined history of black people—in the hope that these neglected parts of history would become part of the mainstream body of Western history. Drawing on a vast amount of research, Rogers was attempting to point out the absurdity of racial divisions. Indeed his belief in one race—humanity—precluded the idea of several different ethnic races. The series marshals the data he had collected as evidence to prove his underlying humanistic thesis: that people were one large family without racial boundaries. Self-trained and self-published, Rogers and his work were immensely popular and influential during his day, even cited by Malcolm X. The books are presented here in their original editions.