The Scandalous History of Circumcision (w/ Ben Bernard)

We’re back from our summer vacation and ready, naturally, to talk about dicks. We’re joined for our tenth episode by fellow historian Ben Bernard to talk about the strange career of circumcision in America, which the writer Edward Wallerstein in 1980 called “a solution in search of a problem.” Wallerstein’s book made an appearance in a Christopher Street dialogue between George Stambolian and Larry Mass at a time when gay men–and increasingly, Americans writ large–were skeptical of medical expertise. We learn that circumcision was recommended in the late 19th century as a masturbation-prevention technique; when this sort of moralism fell out of fashion, it was outfitted with new (but equally dubious) medical justifications. We talk about how our evangelical and Jewish backgrounds shaped our awareness of circumcision, Ben and Blake's experiences of uncut cocks in France, how gay guys think about their own dicks and other guys’ dicks, how sameness and difference can be eroticized in different ways, and why circumcision has never really become a major political issue despite people vigorously objecting to it.Click here to subscribe to the Off Christopher Street newsletter.Benjamin S. Bernard is a historian whose work focuses on education, gender and sexuality, and the culture of early modern France. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Public Seminar, Inside Higher Ed, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and others. SourcesGeorge Stambolian and Lawrence D. Mass, “The Unkindest Cut of All,” Christopher Street, May 1982.Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy (1980).Ben Bernard, “The University’s Never-Ending Crisis,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2026.Lawrence D. Mass, “The New Narcissism and Homosexuality: The Psychiatric Connection,” Christopher Street, January 1980.George Stambolian, “Paris and Poppers,” New York Native, 1983.Todd Shepard, Sex, France and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (2017)Todd Shepard, “Against Vanilla History: Why and How Histories of Sexual Acts Could Matter to Intellectual Historians,” The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas (2023).Danielle Spencer, Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (2020).Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star (1994).John Powers, A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism (2012).