Back in 2009 while I was a busy professor of anthropology teaching my signature class, “Gender, Sex and Culture,” I decided to address the “Sex History” assignment I had created. While my students typically discussed first experiences of sexual intercourse and reported that all “was good,” in engaging the topic for myself, I faced that I had been a “sex researcher,” who had been chasing all matter of “data” both for my own enlightenment as well as to understand the vast human experience.
I wasn’t just interested in how orgasm worked for me and my partners, but how humans everywhere engage its energy and possibility. And so it went with “partnering patterns” which drew me far beyond the monogamous modeling of my parents onto studying polygamy in Africa and Papua New Guinea and completing a doctoral dissertation on polyamory and jealousy in 2003.
Ultimately this appetite for research found its way into my new book, 177 Lovers and Counting: My Life as a Sex Researcher (Rowman and Littlefield, January 2, 2024). In 2018 I had grown so tired of this book project that I took classes in solo theater with Jessica Lynn Johnson and planned instead to perform an abbreviated version as a one-woman-show.
Once the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the thought of performing in an empty theater to a live-streamed-audience made the extrovert in me cringe and I retreated to my home office and managed to finish the book. My book received a “massive greenlight” in the spring of 2022 and then through the savvy of my editor Elisabeth Sheff, a series of revisions converted my personal memoir into an auto-ethnography wherein my story was positioned through the lenses of anthropology, politics, history and sexology. In preparing for its release, I decided I did want to do a solo show as well. I reached out to Jessica who has ably guided me into developing this show.
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