Welcome to the first, full, 2025 Letters Read episode. This program was recorded in two locations. The overlying structure in a studio. The other in a noisy restaurant near Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans, during lunch. You will be able to hear the difference. Thanks to Steve Czyck who engineered it all together.

In this podcast, we meet Angela Breckenridge, PhD educator and Mr. Tedd Walley, cartoon artist, designer, and educator.

They were mature adults when they met, fell in love, and married. This is truly a love story. More it is—as the title suggests—about sex and love, gender, and trust through the letters and memories of a cis-gender, normative, monogamous couple in the twenty-first century.

References to research material can be found HERE and the previous, Incubator podcast can be found HERE.

Antenna is this project's fiscal sponsor. This project is brought to you with major support from Corner Foundation a our very anonymous donation.

This mini-podcast continues the 2025 season about sex.

Today’s reading is about love letters. Inspired by documentation of love, two letters in particular.

Moreover this segment focuses on how love works. Like when two people fall for each other. What’s the motivation? Is it simply physical attraction, raw sex appeal? Or is feeling love something more?

Listen and learn.

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".

October 29 at 7:00 pm CDT
Newcomb Institute
Diboll Gallery, room 300
3rd floor of the Commons
43 Newcomb Place
Tulane University campus.

A second reading from the archives of Josephine Louise Newcomb. This one performed, live, at Newcomb Institute.

Emcee and Readers: Nick Slie, Lisa Shattuck, Shadow Angelina Starkey, and Robert Valley

H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was established by Josephine Louise Monnier Newcomb (“Jo”) as she was called, 1816 to 1901) as a memorial to her daughter Sophie who died at the age of 15. At a time when women were discouraged from education, an institution devoted to higher learning for women was a revolutionary idea.

Ladies of Mrs. Newcomb’s privileged class were instead taught to have “accomplishments”. Such as parlor entertainments like piano playing and polite conversation. For the lower classes—who had to hire themselves out as domestic help to survive—cooking, cleaning, sewing, nursing, and caregiving for other people’s families were their lot. For them, education, such as it were, was learned scrubbing pots on the job.

Until its post-Katrina consolidation into Tulane University, Newcomb College was a separate, four-year, baccalaureate-giving institution. Entirely – for – women.

Through Josephine Louise Newcomb’s letters, this reading tells that tale. It was created in grateful partnership with Susan Tucker and Beth Willinger. In great part, this presentation relies on their scholarship, insights, and their project of the same name, The Letters of Josephine Louise Newcomb.

From 1981 to 1998, K. (Kenneth) Brad Ott wrote, edited, and published the grassroots Dialogue Newsjournal reporting community activism and activities in New Orleans.

This third mini podcast in the four-part LETTERS READ series is produced in support of LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana and New Orleans AIDS MemoryProject. Antenna is LETTERS READ fiscal sponsor.

This podcast is about activism. Independent publishing in the later part of the 20th Century.

At a time when mainstream media would not, The Dialogue Newsjournal published progressive ideas in New Orleans questioning social issues such as: immigration and poverty, police corruption, racism, reproductive rights, gay bashing and AIDS paranoia, that strange new disease plaguing the male gay population, intravenous drug users, sex workers, and marginal members of society country-wide. Until 1982, there wasn’t even a name for the disease later known as HIV|AIDS.

Letters Read is an ongoing series in which local performers interpret letters and written documents about culturally vital individuals from various times and Louisiana communities—focusing on New Orleans. Now in its eighth consecutive season. Performances are free and open to the general public.

Segment 3 in the mini-series about the early days of the New Orleans HIV|AIDS epidemic.

Comprising two recorded clips from an interview with Noel Twilbeck. In the first, Twillbeck explains the origins of NO/AIDS Task Force. Describing the beginning of the HIV|AIDS epidemic. Early 1980s. The second clip refers to a letter. “The Letter”. Notice of the award from HRSA documenting their new status as an FQHC. As Twillbeck explained, “HRSA” is the Bureau of Primary Health Care. A federal  institution funding affordable, accessible, and high-quality primary health care to underserved communities. A game-changer for NO/AIDS Task Force which then became Crescent Car.

This series thanks LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, Corner Foundation, and LETTERS READ fiscal sponsor Antenna.

Allow us to introduce the 2024 mini-series of letters and documents from the early days of HIV|AIDS. A late 20th century crisis. Most of the material is New Orleans in particular, Louisiana, and then the country at large. This mini-series is produced in partnership with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana and I thank them for their diligence preserving history and for helping in this production.

Each mini launches at noon, Central time, on the following dates and remain available thereafter.

This is a gently evolving series subject to change.