• by Matthew S. Bajko, Assistant Editor 
• Wednesday, January 28, 2026 (ebar.com)

Kinsey Institute curator Rebecca Fasman stood in front of displays for the new exhibit “Desire on the Couch” in the Desai | Matta Gallery at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Photo: Matthew S. Bajko

Beginning in the 1930s Louise Lawrence began clipping out news articles about transsexuals, cross dressing, and other aspects about the lives of gender-nonconforming people for a scrapbook she was creating. The San Francisco resident also compiled a second scrapbook about her own transition as a self-identified male-to-female cross-dressing activist in the 1940s.
 
A third scrapbook she put together contained the ephemera Lawrence collected about female impersonation and drag shows. Lawrence, who died in 1976 in her mid-60s, had also befriended the acclaimed sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, Ph.D., a professor of zoology based at Indiana University, and corresponded with him throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
 
In one letter dated September 21, 1950, she detailed receiving a visit from a friend in Los Angeles who showed her his own collection of clippings and photos documenting female impersonators and transvestism.
 
“He had well over one hundred photos of fellows in drag. Some were professional impersonators but the bulk of them were what I would call transvestites,” wrote Lawrence. “I certainly wish that you could see them for it is truly a marvelous collection and one that I would give anything to own.”
 
One letter dated July 11, 1951 from Kinsey, five years prior to his death at the age of 62, thanks Lawrence for “all the good help” she provided him when he came to San Francisco to visit.
 
“As I bring together all of the material that you have contributed it begins to make a marvelous assemblage of data,” he wrote.
 
Their correspondence and digitized copies of Lawrence’s scrapbooks are now on view in San Francisco at the new exhibition “Desire on the Couch” that opened Wednesday in the Desai | Matta Gallery at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). It is a joint exhibition between the school and the Kinsey Institute based at IU’s Bloomington, Indiana campus.
 
Some of the letters between Lawrence and Kinsey can be perused in one of the six glass vitrines for the exhibit mounted to the walls of the gallery space in the lobby of CIIS’ building at 1453 Mission Street near 11th Street. A monitor provides attendees a way to flip through Lawrence’s scrapbooks.
 
They are “a cool archive within our collection of transgender life in the 1940s, especially in California as well as across the U.S. and the world,” said Rebecca Fasman, who co-curated the exhibit with CIIS Chair of Research Psychology Christopher Walling, Ph.D.
 
Fasman, who is queer and lives in Washington, D.C., has been the curator for the Kinsey Institute for close to a decade. She provided the Bay Area Reporter a sneak peek of the exhibit Monday as she was working on its final installation.
 
One item in the exhibit she is particularly excited for people to see is an April 9, 1935, letter Sigmund Freud sent to an American mom of a gay son who had written to him for advice. Writing in English the Austrian neurologist credited with founding psychoanalysis told her that homosexuality was “nothing to be ashamed of” and should not be classified as “an illness.”
 
He notes “many highly respected individuals” such as Plato, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci were gay. Freud added, “It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime and a cruelty too.”
 
Freud “was an outlier” in such thinking during his time, noted Fasman, pointing to how homosexuality was included in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM for short. It wouldn’t be until 1973 that it was removed from what is basically the bible of the field.
 
Despite Freud’s stance, that was a difficult fight waged by LGBTQ advocates and members of the field in conjunction with their straight allies, said Fasman.
 
“He very clearly made his opinion known, and he helped create the field,” she said. “It was something he knew to be true and sexual researchers like Kinsey knew to be true.”
 

‘Exhibition about change’
Through its rarely-seen letters, photographs, and archival materials the exhibition “aims to reveal how ideas about sexuality and desire have long been argued over, resisted, and reimagined,” according to the curators. As the introductory sentence for it declares, “This is an exhibition about change.”
 
It marks the first time since Fasman joined Kinsey in 2015, initially hired as its manager for traveling exhibitions, that it has mounted an exhibit in San Francisco. It came about due to Walling being selected for one of the institute’s fellowships and bringing up using Kinsey’s archive of more than 600,000 materials to examine the fight over delisting homosexuality in the DSM. Fasman suggested using that topic as a jumping off point to examine how “knowledge production involves multiple voices and perspectives” from inside and outside academia and scientific fields.
 
As he was traveling out of the country ahead of the exhibit opening, Walling told the B.A.R. in an emailed reply that it is debuting amid public debate about sexual orientation and gender identity in the country’s political, scientific, and cultural circles that mirrors those reflected in the more than 70 items he and Fasman selected to put on display.
 
“This exhibit is opening at a moment when conversations about desire, sexuality, gender, and the body are once again being constrained politically, culturally, and sometimes even clinically. ‘Desire on the Couch’ reminds us that psychoanalysis and sexology were born out of a radical willingness to look directly at what society often prefers to repress or moralize,” wrote Walling. “At a time when sexual knowledge is increasingly polarized, simplified, or weaponized, this exhibit offers historical depth and nuance. It shows that rigorous, compassionate inquiry into desire has long been central to understanding psychic life, trauma, creativity, and freedom.”
 
And opening it at this time, added Walling, “is a way of reclaiming complexity and curiosity in a cultural climate that often resists both.”
 
He also pointed to Freud’s letter as one of his favorite items on display, not simply due to its historical import but because of its contemporaneous feeling.
 
“As a psychoanalyst myself, I read that letter and can almost imagine Freud writing it to my own mother back in Kentucky in the 1990s – despite the fact that it was written at the very beginning of the 20th century. His tone is humane, non-pathologizing, and deeply respectful; he speaks to a parent’s fear with clarity and compassion rather than judgment,” wrote Walling, himself a gay man. “That letter reminds us that within psychoanalysis, there has always been a strand of thought that recognized sexual difference not as an illness to be cured, but as a variation of human love and desire. Seeing it here collapses time in a powerful way and makes the history feel personal, lived, and still urgently relevant.”
 
The exhibit is “text heavy” because of its focus on letters and other correspondence, acknowledged Fasman. They did purposefully look to include more visual material to help break up the exhibit, such as a selection of homoerotic black-and-white drawings created by Andrey Avinoff, a gay man who was the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for two decades in the first half of the 1900s.
 
A renowned expert on Asiatic butterflies, he struck up a correspondence with Kinsey and was working with him on a book of erotic art they were unable to finish before Avinoff’s death in 1949. Also featured in the exhibit are four black-and-white male nude photos taken by George Platt Lynes along with correspondence between him and Kinsey.
 
A gay man who was Vogue magazine’s first staff photographer and also struck up a friendship with Kinsey, Platt Lynes donated roughly 2,300 negatives to the Institute for Sex Research now known as the Kinsey Institute. In a May 15, 1950, note of thanks Kinsey remarked the material from Platt Lynes was “excellent” and “the best nude photography that we have in our collection.”
 
Also on display are items related to pioneering LGBTQ rights groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Daughters of Bilitis founded by the late San Francisco couple Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. Walling hopes the exhibit will inspire a sense of personal curiosity in attendees and illustrate for them the wide-reaching impact cultural forces can have on their lives.
 
“I hope visitors leave with a deeper appreciation that desire is not something to be reduced to pathology, identitarian labels, or moral judgments. Desire is relational, embodied, historically shaped, and deeply human,” wrote Walling. “I want people to understand that psychoanalysis and sexology – at their best – are not about fixing or normalizing people, but about expanding our capacity to tolerate complexity, difference, and ambiguity. If visitors walk away feeling more curious about their own inner lives, more compassionate toward others, and more aware of how cultural forces shape what we are allowed to want or say, then the exhibit has done its work.”
 
Fasman told the B.A.R. she hopes it is illustrative of how connected Kinsey was with others throughout his life, from colleagues in his fields of study to community activists and artists, all of whom helped to shape his thinking about human desire, sexuality, and other topics he researched and wrote about. It speaks to the importance of hearing from multiple perspectives in the pursuit of societal change, she said.
 
“There are multiple voices and methods required to make substantive change in society. There is not just one way,” said Fasman.
 
The exhibit’s opening is timed with the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco running through Friday. Tickets on those days cost $27.24, with Fasman and Walling providing guided tours periodically throughout the day, on a first come, first served basis, and can be purchased online.

Starting on February 6 tickets will cost $21.99 for self-guided viewing and can be bought online.
 
It closes on March 14, and two days prior, Walling will be in conversation with Kinsey Institute Executive Director Justin Garcia, Ph.D., about the exhibit and Garcia’s book “The Intimate Animal.” Tickets for in-person or online access cost $11.49 to $32.49 and can be purchased online.