This is a fantastic work of biography, history, and historiography about a little known figure in the American history of sex - Gershon Legman. Legman is a peculiar character - a son of Polish orthodox Jewish immigrants who was raised in strict academic and religious tradition to be a rabbi, but abandoned that life at an early age to be a researcher of sex and erotica. Legman’s background in textual study, research, and Jewish oral history made him an excellent scholar; his passion project was compiling a bibliography of all of the folklore, slang, and cultural traditions around sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. He was not a traditional academic, in that he had no formal college education and spent most of his scholarly career as an unaffiliated, unpaid researcher, scrounging up sponsorships and partnerships with publishers as often as he could. His magnum opus, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, was the product of decades of compilation and research analyzing over 2000 dirty jokes from deep within “low culture” folklore. Legman was most well known as one of the first academics to treat sex and erotica as a legitimate scholarly discipline and primary text worthy of analysis.
Not only was Legman working in a subject considered somewhat taboo even today, he was doing so at the beginning of the 20th century, when sexual censorship and repression was at (what I would consider) a peak. Publishers working with or distributing sexually explicit content were constantly at odds with the postal service and the police, and raids on publishing houses or back rooms were common. Legman fought against this censorship, calling it a symptom of America’s own sexual repression under the guise of morality; he wrote a book on American sexual censorship called Love and Death. He eventually became an expat after finally being put on trial for distributing this very book via the postal service.
As a student of history myself, I am thoroughly impressed with how Davis uses a wide variety of primary and secondary sources as evidence in her biography, from census data to private letters to Legman’s own autobiography. Thank you to NetGalley and Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World for providing me with a copy of this book.
