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So I guess what I'm trying to say is Comstock is the invention of the Comstock Act itself is inseparable from the invention of sexuality.

And the ways that sexuality is regulated by the state, these are things that are kind of happening at the same time.

That there's this category of human the same time. That there's this

category of human being called a homosexual. And there's this category of sexual activity called

sodomy and all of these sort of categorizations and breaking down, which in our sort of historical

forgetting, get shorthanded to like, oh, well, that's so Victorian. Um, so it is producing

sexuality. And I agree. Like, we haven't left that's so Victorian. So it is producing sexuality. And I agree.

Like, we haven't left that universe at all.

No, we're fully within it.

And, you know, maybe just to give folks a sense of sort of, okay, let's start talking about this guy.

Who's this guy?

Anthony Comstock, right?

He's literally just like some guy, right?

He's not a professional

politician. He's a New Yorker who is just so outraged by immorality and vice. And his sense of

obscenity, right, his personal sense of obscenity, which certainly was reflected in kind

of reformist, you know, Christian. I mean, he's a prominent, you know,

member of the YMCA at the time, you know, but the story kind of goes that a friend of his died

in Brooklyn and he was so outraged and felt like, you know, the immoral world of Brooklyn

in New York, this world of drugs and sex and prostitution and,

you know, pornography had killed his friend, you know, that he decides to take it on him,

...