Hello! Welcome to Letters Read. The ongoing series in which letters and written documents about culturally vital individuals from various times and Louisiana communities are interpreted into spoken word performances. These are free, open to the general public, live sometimes, and other podcasts. This is the ninth consecutive season.

This season is about sex. The physical activity we engage in for pleasure, sport, and procreation. Part of this investigation is gender and words we use to define how and with whom we have sex. For 2025 Letters Read, the word “sex” is a corporal act, and “gender” a political construct.

“Sex”was chosen for being a show-stoppingly blatant topic. In addition to its attention-grabbing quality, thinking about sex can be nuanced. For instance, what kinds of sex are legal and what not? What modes of having sex are socially acceptable? And not? Information for this season is sourced from many institutions including and not exclusive to: the Kinsey Institute website, the Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast organization, the Planned Parenthood archive at Newcomb Institute, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. Additional information is based on recorded interviews with medical professionals, everyday individuals and practitioners of sex and sex-related practices, and members of alternative networks for those outside of official institutions.

Listen to this incubator-style, mini-podcast and stay tuned to Letters Read 2025 and the upcoming Sex Cycle of programming.

IMAGE: El Sartorio (also El Satario) (1907 or 1912).

This podcast wraps up the 2024 incubator-style programming on the early days of HIV | AIDS.

This series is brought to you in support of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

Most productions in this series are short, mini-podcasts, five to seven minutes long. This podcast takes longer to wrap up a difficult and emotional topic.

It comprises Sims's experience in Los Angeles, ca. 1990s, as director of the second AIDS hospice facility in the country.

Sims talks, in a straightforward manner about AIDS, hospice, and dying. Interjecting levity, and, where appropriate, humor.

The recording was created in two parts. The original interview with Sims was performed by Nancy Sharon Collins, Letters Read director. The second, narrative part is Collins again. The podcasts circles back to other Letters Read subjects Stewart Butler, Noel Twilbeck, and Mark Gonzalez.

Stay tuned to Letters Read for more compelling programming in 2025.

This podcast, and one or two more before year’s end, wrap-up the 2024 incubator-style mini-series on the early days of HIV | AIDS. Brought to you in support of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

The recording is about Pierre Rene “Peter”, as he was known, DeLancey. A sad story with a bittersweet ending. He was queer. At a time when being gay or homosexual or light in one’s loafers was not okay in most polite societies.

Peter's story brings together two previous Letters Read subjects, Stewart Butler of The Faerie Playhouse and Skip Ward. Both produced, and broadcast, at the beginning of the COVID epidemic in 2020.

The featured image is a portrait of Peter from Burt Harter's "Encounters with the Nude Male" self published by Harter in 1997. The image was included in a Doug McCash, Times-Picayune article published June 25, 2002 entitled "The Life and Death of a Painter in Legacy and Limbo".