CBH Talk | Jane Kamensky and Cynthia Carr Discuss “Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution”
In her book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, acclaimed historian Jane Kamensky chronicles an improbable twentieth-century heroine and offers an entirely new understanding of the so-called sexual revolution.
Candida Royalle was a porn star and cofounder of the feminist, sex-positive production company Femme Productions, who made her name in a stigmatized industry and lived along the cultural fault lines of her generation. She danced at Woodstock, marched for women’s liberation, survived the AIDS crisis, and became a talk show regular, interviewed by Phil Donahue, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Morton Downey Jr., Jane Pauley, and many others.
With full access to Royalle’s remarkable archive, Kamensky spent years examining the intersection of Royalle’s life with the clashes that define her era. The New York Times describes the book as “a labor of empathy that refuses to simplify or valorize its subject.” Kamensky discusses the book and Royalle’s legacy with writer Cynthia Carr, chronicler of the work of contemporary artists who wrote for The Village Voice from 1987 until 2003.
Cynthia Carr photo by Timothy Greenfield Sanders
Participants
Jane Kamensky’s many books include A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley, winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History book prize along with three others. For thirty years, she worked as a history professor and higher education leader, most recently as Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and director of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In 2024, Kamensky became the president of Monticello/the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Cynthia Carr is the author, most recently of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar. Her previous books are Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Carr chronicled the work of contemporary artists as a Village Voice staff writer in the 1980s and 1990s (under the byline C.Carr). Her work has also appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, TDR: The Drama Review and other publications. She won a Guggenheim in 2007 and was a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY Graduate Center in 2016-17.
