“In the 1970s…most dildos were made of heat-treated rubber and would melt with heat,” Duncan said. Duncan returned to Brooklyn armed with confidence and began investigating the dildos that were already on the market. He saw his chance and took it: Surrounded by his target market, he asked if they would purchase a dildo. During the session, Duncan patiently listened to speakers discuss their challenges with sex but didn’t hear many solutions. When we spoke in 2013, Duncan told me that when he traveled to an Indianapolis disability conference in 1971, he was thrilled to see a session on sex and disability. Duncan began brainstorming on his own about how he could make sex aids for the disabled. Even in the disability movement at large, many chose to focus on other, more “serious” issues. While many saw themselves as sexual beings, their doctors-not to mention the sexual revolution-did not. Many other disabled people wanted to have good sex but didn’t know where to turn for help. As Duncan became involved in the disability movement in the late 1960s, he learned that he wasn’t alone. Still, Duncan was dissatisfied, and he began considering penile substitutes-but in 1965, his options were bleak. (Duncan’s girlfriend didn’t mind they were married in the hospital.) A skilled dancer and handsome ladies’ man, Duncan was devastated. Within seconds, the 37-year-old émigré from Grenada was paralyzed from the waist down. And their path to acceptance within the feminist movement started in an unlikely place: the basement of Gosnell Duncan. In 1965, Duncan was welding the bed of a truck on his overnight shift at the International Harvester Company in Chicago when the vehicle fell on top of him. But 40 years ago, sex toys were highly contentious.
Since we live in an age when any woman can waltz into Target and emerge bearing a shopping bag full of Fifty Shades of Grey–branded cock rings, Trojan vibrators, and strawberry lube, it’s hard to imagine that sex toys were once controversial within the feminist movement.
This article appears in our 2015 Summer issue, Blue. Subscribe today!