S I X

Duncan’s Dildos

A few years before Dodson introduced vibrators to her consciousness-raising group, Gosnell Duncan was miles away in Chicago, working at the International Harvester Company. One fall day in 1965, during the early-morning hours of the overnight shift, he was welding the bed of a truck, and the car fell on top of him. Within seconds, the thirty-seven-year-old recent émigré from Grenada was paralyzed from the waist down.²⁶⁰ A skilled Calypso dancer and handsome ladies’ man, Duncan was never able to have an erection again.²⁶¹

Growing up on the island of Grenada, Duncan had been raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, but as he grew older, he had abandoned the church. He became a father while he was in his early twenties, and he ended up having four children, all with different women. In 1963, Duncan decided to enroll in a medical engineering program at a college in New Brunswick, Canada; en route to Canada, he stopped off in Brooklyn to visit a friend, Angela, from Trinidad. Angela introduced Duncan to another friend, at whose house Duncan could stay, and, with his eye on Angela, Duncan decided to abandon the Canadian degree program and stay in Brooklyn. Angela and Duncan started dating, and Duncan began looking for a job in New York, to no avail. He was able to land a job in Chicago at International Harvester, and despite the distance, they continued dating, with Angela making frequent trips to visit him. It was in Chicago that Duncan had his accident in which his spine was severed. Angela stayed by his side, and they were married in his hospital room. Soon thereafter, they moved back to Brooklyn.262

Although Duncan’s medical expenses were covered by International Harvester, his income was limited, so Angela got a job as a lab technician. Things weren’t easy for either of them as they confronted Duncan’s new life as a paraplegic. Duncan tried starting a number of businesses, but none of them really caught on. Meanwhile, he remained frustrated with his inability to get an erection; his spine injury had made him completely impotent. He read up on all the current literature on penile substitutes he could find, but his options were limited in 1965, and he didn’t know about Marche’s dildos yet. As Duncan became involved in the disability movement in the late 1960s, he learned that he wasn’t alone. Many other disabled people wanted to have good sex, but they didn’t know where to turn for help. While many saw themselves as sexual beings, their doctors—not to mention the sexual revolution—did not. Even in the disability movement at large, many chose to focus on other more “serious” issues.

“As I was learning to live my life from scratch, no one even mentioned the word ‘sexuality,’” Duncan said. “The women in particular had problems. They couldn’t get out of the house to find themselves a lover, or if they had one, there would be nowhere they could take him.”²⁶³ In fact, many disabled people were “more concerned with sexual functioning than walking again.”²⁶⁴ Duncan began brainstorming on his own how he could make sex aids for the disabled.

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Life for Duncan wasn’t easy. In the 1960s and 1970s, many public spaces were not wheelchair accessible, and most colleges didn’t admit disabled students. Duncan connected with any disabled people he could to try to share information. One person he reached out to was former Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella, who had been paralyzed in a car accident in 1958. Campanella was one of the first black players in Major League Baseball. He started playing in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson made his debut.265

When Duncan became a paraplegic, the disability movement was still in its infancy, but it was the start of large-scale change in the status of disabled people, and Duncan was at the forefront of the movement. An offshoot of the larger counterculture movement, the disability movement got its start in the early 1960s in Berkeley, California, when—at his mother’s urging—community-college student and quadriplegic Edward Roberts chose a four-year college based not on whether it was handicapped accessible but on its academic merits, which was a radical idea at the time. Roberts chose the University of California–Berkeley, but when he began talking to the administration about attending school there, they told him, “We tried cripples and they don’t work.” So he sued. Roberts won and paved the way for other disabled students to go to Berkeley and went on to cofound the Center for Independent Living, a national organization.²⁶⁶

Roberts’s victory didn’t change the world for the disabled overnight. It did, however, spur others to get involved in the disability rights movement. When Duncan began taking part in the movement, the time was right for a new approach to handicapped sexuality, as the incidence of paraplegics and quadriplegics had increased dramatically due to injuries sustained during World War II. The U.S. Public Health Service estimated that there were nearly one hundred thousand paraplegics in the country in 1953.²⁶⁷

The issues facing disabled people were manifold, and it was wonderful that they were finally being addressed. Still, Duncan was troubled by his sexual limitations, and so he was thrilled to see a session on sex and disability at an Indianapolis disability conference in 1971. During the session, he patiently listened to speakers discuss their challenges with sex but didn’t hear many solutions. He saw his chance and took it: Surrounded by his target market, he asked if they would purchase a dildo. The answer was a resounding yes.268

Duncan returned to Brooklyn armed with confidence and began investigating the dildos that were already on the market, like the Marches’ and Malorruses’. “In the 1970s . . . most dildos were made of heat-treated rubber and would melt with heat,” Duncan said. “I wanted to have a product that was different. . . . . Something that . . . you couldn’t [melt] by washing and cleaning it.” Besides the melt factor, he found many dildos were also made of irritating materials and had strong chemical odors that people were often sensitive to.^{269 270}

Dissatisfied with the current offerings, Duncan decided to start his own dildo business. Unlike most of the men who had come before him (and they were usually always men), he didn’t just want to make dildos for money. “He was the most generous person I’ve ever met to the point where he’d give away everything he had,” his niece Lurline Martineau said. He saw himself as a healer, and he simply wanted to help.²⁷¹

He began by investigating newer, safer materials for dildos. At the time, most sex toys were made of polyvinyl chloride, which had major drawbacks, including porousness, a “plastic” smell, and the inability to retain heat.²⁷² While working as an auto mechanic, Duncan had been impressed by the pliable silicone rubber that didn’t melt even when exposed to the intense heat of an engine. This heat resistance meant that silicone could be sterilized in boiling water. Plus, silicone lacked the strong chemical odors found in other materials. The only problem was that the silicone used in automobile parts was not exactly safe for the body.²⁷³

If he could develop a silicone safe enough for the body, he thought, he could create a dildo different than anything on the market. A silicone rubber dildo would be nonporous, making it appealingly smooth and capable of being sanitized between partners. He couldn’t create a new form of silicone on his own, though. He needed help.274 Following the conference in Indianapolis, he reached out to General Electric. “I sent them a letter explaining that I needed a rubber-based product that is nonirritating to the human body,” he said later. They put him in touch with one of their chemists.²⁷⁵

GE was the leader in silicone development at the time, selling the material for use as adhesives and footwear, among other products. Duncan and the chemist corresponded for nine months, tweaking various formulas to get the perfect silicone: Smooth, flesh-like, and safe for insertion into the human body. They finally hit on a formula, and Duncan set up a test lab in his basement.

Since sex toys were still a marginally legal business, there was no road map on how to proceed, no trade associations to consult with. Duncan just had some vats of silicone and his ideas. “The designs were all my mental creations,” he said. “I remember writing to the Kinsey Center, and I corresponded with them. From what I read, and using myself as the normal, I was able to come up with sizes.” These sizes ranged from six to nine and a half inches long and one to two inches wide in girth. He began by making a model out of clay, then a mold after that. He would pour the silicone into the molds and then mix in a catalyst to help the silicone solidify. Then he added scents to the mixture, such as licorice smell.²⁷⁶ The silicone dildos were produced under the brand name Paramount Therapeutic Products.²⁷⁷ There was nothing sexy about the marketing for his dildos. In fact, he didn’t even call them dildos. As Marche had done before him, Duncan sold his dildos as prosthetic strap-on devices.

Even with such clinical marketing, selling sex toys to the disabled community was no easy feat. Not only were sex toys taboo among the general populace, they were doubly taboo within the handicapped community. For starters, disabled people weren’t thought to be sexual. The majority of doctors didn’t address sexuality with their disabled patients. “Most people regard the sexuality of the disabled as nonexistent,” wrote a woman to The Squeaky Wheel, a magazine produced by the National Paraplegia Foundation. “What ignorant write-offs of such moments of joy.”278

To be fair, not all physicians were ignoring disabled sexuality. Some doctors even suggested that disabled men use vibrators on their penises to stimulate erections. These doctors recognized that, as numerous handicapped men had reported, an inability to have an erection or orgasm was nearly as devastating as not being able to walk. One 1972 study even looked specifically at the use of vibrators on disabled men, finding that vibrators more than doubled the percentage of paraplegic men who were capable of ejaculation (from 10 percent to 27 percent).²⁷⁹

Although using sex toys to improve partnered sex among disabled people was starting to become seen as a positive thing, masturbation among the disabled—especially female masturbation—was still somewhat stigmatized. A 1977 Planned Parenthood brochure called “Toward Intimacy: Family Planning and Sexuality Concerns of Physically Disabled Women” was hesitant to unequivocally encourage handicapped women to masturbate. Although the brochure quoted a quadriplegic woman saying that masturbation was one of the few “pleasant” feelings she had and that it “helped get rid of the pain,” it later cautioned that masturbation “may conflict with your religious or ethical values.”²⁸⁰

Despite this work to improve sexuality for the disabled, popular culture still didn’t portray handicapped people in a sexual light. Disabled people were almost never eroticized in film or TV but instead were either depicted as objects of pity or examples of courageous people who had overcome obstacles. Although sometimes disabled people were portrayed as objects of desire or even romantic interests, this was rare. One example is the 1978 movie Coming Home, starring Jane Fonda as a woman who falls in love with a paraplegic. The only place where disabled sex was usually depicted was in porn, as fetishistic eroticism.

Duncan’s dildos were filling a void left by the many doctors and sex educators who were ignoring the needs of the disabled. His connections with the disabled community allowed him to spread the word of his dildos to doctors, physical therapists, and leaders in the community.281 He began sending his catalogs throughout the country to medical centers that worked with handicapped patients. Duncan’s line expanded to include not just strap-on dildos but also sex toys for quadriplegics that were held by the mouth.²⁸²

In the 1970s, Duncan began working with a pioneering center for the disabled, Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York. Goldwater had made major advances for disabled people, but, in the late 1950s, disabled people who were placed in Goldwater were expected to live their whole lives at the hospital, completely separate from the rest of society. They were not expected to live normal lives, go to college, or get married. That changed when, in 1958, a young quadriplegic woman at Goldwater named Anne Emerman decided not to settle for this cordoned-off life. Despite the objections of the social worker assigned to her (who said her aspiration for higher education was “a fantasy, and fantasy can lead to mental illness”), Emerman applied and got into college and went on to get a master’s in social work from Columbia University. Emerman also married and had children. Her courageous efforts led her to be the first “test case” for independent living, and her success led Goldwater to become a center that was at the forefront of disability care. By the 1970s, they were true innovators, and they invited Duncan to work with them and give lectures on the “Sexual Functioning of the Spinal Cord Injured Person” and the larger issues surrounding sexuality and disability.²⁸³

It was an incredible opportunity for Duncan’s work to be on a national stage, but working with healthcare professionals at Goldwater and other hospitals also brought with it complications. Although the more open-minded centers were receptive to Duncan’s sex toys, they also wanted a say in how they were marketed. When Duncan tried to make his brochures more consumer-friendly—with a lighthearted and sexy touch—he got backlash. “While I am all for fun in sex, I am somewhat leery of whimsey [sic] in or out of bed,” wrote Mary Romano, who worked in the Social Service Department of the Presbyterian Hospital at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. “I wonder if you might consider modifying those of your brochures geared to a handicapped population so that they look and read a bit more clinically.” One of her suggestions was that he change the name of his newly named dildo from “Joy Boy” to “artificial penis #1, #2, or #3.”284 This wasn’t the kind of business Duncan had envisioned.

Duncan’s dildos were revolutionary not just because he was designing them for the handicapped or because he was using silicone but also because they appeared in different colors. At the time, the standard dildo was in an off-white pinkish color referred to as “flesh-colored,” which alienated all those whose flesh wasn’t the color of the dildo. It was only when Duncan, a dark-skinned Caribbean paraplegic, started making dildos that the colors and styles changed radically. Duncan wanted to make his dildos in a variety of shades of black, so he contacted A. S. Crouse, a technician at General Electric, for help. Crouse informed him that there were no off-the-shelf shades that would work, so he suggested Duncan create his own and gave him advice on which silicone pigments to use. Duncan experimented in his basement lab to create just the right skin colors, blending brown and black organic pigments with silicone oil.²⁸⁵ Duncan sold his dildos in four different colors: three different shades of black (Mulatto, Negroid, and Black), and Caucasian.

There were further innovations in the design of the devices. Unlike Marche’s prosthetic penis attachments, Duncan’s strap-on dildos were solid, not hollow. They were “designed to be strapped directly over the pubic bone . . . leaving the penis and testicles free.” This was for a good reason. Many of the people in the target audience had catheters attached to their penises and bags strapped to their legs. Duncan’s selling point was that his creations were sex aids “developed and manufactured by a paraplegic for use by paraplegics and quadriplegics and their mates.” In the late 1960s, before Duncan came along, some paraplegics and quadriplegics had already been using strap-on dildos, but there was no company solely devoted to selling dildos to them.286 So this availability meant a whole new market.

Handcrafted dildos came at a steep price, however. They came in a kit with a harness and lubricant and ranged in price from $19.95 to $39.95 (approximately $100 to $200 today), which was prohibitively expensive for many.²⁸⁷ Most sex toys at the time ranged in price from $10 to $25, with most closer to the $10 mark.²⁸⁸ One customer wrote a letter to Duncan saying that “‘pricing’ a product out of the reach of the buying public . . . is my first concern.” He suggested reducing the price by 30 percent or renting them to customers. The latter was an idea that thankfully Duncan never took up.²⁸⁹

Price was a minor concern in light of the larger concern Duncan was facing: that he could be charged with pandering. The Anti-Pandering Act was enacted in April 1968 supposedly to crack down on sex-related advertising sent through the mail. While obscenity was nearly impossible to define, pandering was an even looser term. The definition of pandering rested upon the person receiving the mail. Anybody who received what they considered to be an “erotically arousing or sexually provocative” ad could report that to the post office. The post office would then send a “Prohibitory Order” letter to the person who mailed the ad and demand that the sender stop sending the mail to the address under threat of law. Even if the ad itself was not legally obscene under the law, if it seemed too sexual for the person receiving it, it would be considered a pandering ad. (If this seems like it violates the First Amendment, well, many people argue that it does.)²⁹⁰

In 1970, Duncan made the mistake of sending his catalog to a family in Streator, Illinois, with four young children. Now, it may not have actually been a mistake. It’s possible that wife ordered it and then the husband found it or vice versa. Whatever the case, they alerted their post office, and Duncan received his first notice that he was violating the law by sending a “pandering advertisement offering for sale erotically arousing or sexually provocative matter.”291 Now he had yet another thing to worry about: the federal government. No matter that what he was making actually was designed to help disabled citizens pursue happiness, or that many of these people were disabled due to fighting wars for the government. He was swept up in an epidemic of chasteness. By 1970, Americans had requested 450,000 prohibitory orders for various companies’ publications; more than 80 percent of these were deemed credible enough by the government for them to issue official stop orders.²⁹²

But that was not all that Duncan had to worry about. During the late 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which was made up of eighteen people representing a wide variety of fields, including legal experts, clergymen, sociologists, and psychologists. The commission’s goal was to determine whether pornography and obscenity actually harmed society. Social scientists performed rigorous studies about the effects of pornography and surveyed the scope of the adult industry. Although the focus was mostly on pornography, they also studied adult bookstores.²⁹³

When President Nixon was elected, he appointed antiporn crusader and founder of the Citizens for Decent Literature Charles Keating to head up the commission. Nixon was hoping to get the result he wanted: that pornography was dangerous and we needed stricter laws. But when the results came in, they were the opposite of what he had hoped. The commission found that pornography did not cause any negative effects, and porn-watchers were not more likely to commit crimes. The commission determined that porn could actually be good for sexual relationships and recommended that all “federal, state, and local legislation prohibiting the sale, exhibition, or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults should be repealed.”294 In other words, the commission said that all the obscenity laws should go and porn should be legal. Even more surprising, the majority of the Americans they had polled agreed that there should not be any restrictions on sales of sexual material to adults.²⁹⁵

Since this was the opposite of the result President Nixon and Commissioner Charles Keating wanted, Nixon decided that he would ignore the findings. He announced, “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from American life.”²⁹⁶ Nixon believed that getting rid of the laws would be the equivalent of “condoning anarchy in every other field”—and Congress agreed, nearly unanimously rejecting the commission’s findings.²⁹⁷ Obscenity continued to be a target.

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That didn’t stop Duncan from making dildos in his Brooklyn basement. Since he was handcrafting them, he had the advantage of being able to make dildos to his customers’ specifications. Just as men would order tailored suits, his customers would order tailored dildos. How he did this was simple. He’d ask male customers to record the length of their penises and then measure the diameter of their penis with a piece of string; they’d then send that measurement and string back to him and he’d make a dildo to those specifications.²⁹⁸ Even in the era of Etsy, such personalization is rare.

Asking for this kind of intimate data automatically made Duncan seem like a confidante to many of his customers, and they shared their personal problems with him as if he were a therapist. Customers wrote lengthy letters to him that went far beyond simply requesting sex toys. They shared intimate details of their sex life and marriages and their secret sexual desires; his disabled customers shared the struggles their disabilities had brought them. The letters are at turns erotic, heartbreaking, and inspiring. One customer spent two pages describing his penis and its ability to stay hard for more than an hour, and then seemed to recognize that he was conversing with a complete stranger. “Could you tell me a little more about yourself?” he wrote. “I feel a little strange telling these things to someone I hardly know.”299

Customers’ letters to Duncan show that his dildos, and the vibrators he later sold, brought people a joy they had never experienced before. “The vibrator and dildo have been a great source of pleasure for me for the past year,” one woman wrote to him. “With both I am able to reach orgasm, which I was unable to do in twenty-five years of marriage.” Although sex toys had brought her first orgasms, she still thought of masturbation as a way to improve sex with a man. “I think what convinced me [to masturbate] was a statement my Doctor made when I complained of my problem. She said, ‘When you masturbate and learn how to bring yourself pleasure, you can be in a better position to have successful sex relations with a mate.’ I thought about what she said and decided that I would purchase a vibrator.” Even though a mate had never been able to give her an orgasm, she still could only be convinced to purchase a vibrator when it was presented as a way to improve partnered sex.³⁰⁰

Other customers were content to stay single and masturbate, but they always evaluated sex toys in terms of how they compared to men. “I’ve had a few men in my life and except for one of them I have never enjoyed sex as much as I do now,” one woman wrote to Duncan.³⁰¹ Another woman wrote to say, “Pleasantly I’m on two weeks vacation and everyday as a rule I leave myself properly satisfied as many as four times! After which I don’t really need a man.”³⁰²

Sex toys could coexist with relationships with men, some customers asserted. They insisted that they weren’t using sex toys because they weren’t able to land a man. For example, a woman named Louise wrote to Duncan in 1980, saying, “The vibrator is not really a substitute for a mate, but in addition to a mate. At the present time I am seeing two men, trying to keep them.”303

Not all of Duncan’s customers were heterosexual. A woman wrote to him on May 27, 1975, saying, “I am a lesbian and would like to know anything in that line, I allsa [sic] am married, ‘But’ my husband does not know I am Lesbian.” Although she remained closeted, Duncan’s mail-order store allowed her to at least explore her lesbian desires surreptitiously.³⁰⁴

The letters and calls poured in, but it was the disabled customers who seemed to reach out the most. Duncan viewed these customers as friends, calling them and writing them extensively. Duncan and his customers would not just share information on sexual matters but also share resources on living with disabilities. In this pre-Internet time, basic information about navigating the world in a wheelchair was hard to come by. One letter writer wrote to Duncan that she couldn’t attend college after she graduated high school in 1961 because colleges weren’t equipped for the handicapped. Disabled customers whose partners were also disabled presented unique problems. “I have Athetoid Cerebral Palsy and my partner is a spastic CP [Cerebral Palsy] man,” wrote one woman. “Therefore, you see we do possibly have multi-problems? He cannot spread his legs whereas I CAN.” She asked if a vibrator would be useful for her partner, but she added this caveat: “Sorry to ask questions, but I FEEL I MUST TRUST YOU IF YOU WANT TO HELP ME. I also hope in turn, that you’ll trust in me?”³⁰⁵

Some customers wrote him in part because they thought sharing their experiences could benefit the disabled community. One disabled customer wrote in detail about how he had sex with his able-bodied wife. Instead of having sex on a bed, which was too uncomfortable, she would lay on the kitchen table with her knees bent while he sat in front of her. “Please keep this infor[mation] private between you and I when communicating,” he wrote. “Altho [sic] you can use our situation as an example when talking to other disabled people who you think would benefit from our case. . . . I hope I’ve helped out some.”306 Duncan believed that all of it—the devices, the open dialogue—was indeed helping very much.

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Although sex toys were one solution to the problem of expressing sexuality while handicapped, this solution was not completely satisfying to some people. They wanted human connection. Since it was difficult to connect with people who shared similar disabilities in the pre-Internet era, Duncan created a one-to-one advisory service from his home. For a small fee, he would give handicapped people around the country information not just on sex but on life.

After receiving an inquiry by mail, Duncan would usually send back a questionnaire tailored to the writer with questions that ranged from details on their spinal-cord injuries to their ability to have erections to what religion they practiced. One Kentucky man wrote to Duncan out of frustration. He was a virgin who wanted badly to have sex, but his doctors and nurses didn’t give him any advice on how to accomplish that. Instead, they told him statistically how likely he was to have an erection, to ejaculate, or to be fertile. They emphasized that any individual questions couldn’t be fully answered until he actually had sex with a woman. Not only did they keep mum on the topic of masturbation, but they also were asking him to jump into the sexual wilderness armed with no specific information. Since this man was a virgin who lacked a frame of reference, he turned to Duncan. Duncan suggested that he start masturbating, get in touch with his female friends, and buy a dildo and a vibrator.³⁰⁷ Practical and basic advice, certainly—but something not being offered to this man anywhere else.

While giving advice and selling sex toys to the disabled was emotionally satisfying, it wasn’t bringing Duncan the money he had hoped it would. He needed a new market. Duncan had also tried selling some of his dildos to transsexuals in Canada, but that market also wasn’t big enough.308 He needed to find another group of people to target or his business wasn’t going to survive.