Judith "Judy" Reisman: From '60s folksinger to anti-sex crusader

Judy Reisman and Friend

In 1990 when Cincinnati charged photographer Robert Mapplethorpe with obscenity over his art exhibit "The Perfect Moment," the prosecution called only one expert witness: the anti-Alfred Kinsey polemicist Judith "Judy" Reisman. The defense objected, arguing that Reisman's only qualification for evaluating art was her early work as a songwriter. 

A songwriter?

Yes, it's true. Reisman—who made a career of crusading against sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and later served as a conservative commentator on WorldNetDaily—began as a folksinger in the liberal urban-folk scene of the early-to-mid 1960s. 

In her post-music career, Reisman became laser focused on Kinsey, writing books with titles such as Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America; Stolen Honor, Stolen Innocence: How America Was Betrayed by the Lies and Sexual Crimes of a Mad "Scientist"; Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences; and Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People. She became active in abstinence-only programs, and Ronald Reagan's Justice Department gave Reisman $734,000 to study pornography (even though her credentials, critics said, were "practically cosmetic").

Despite all this, her early folk songs and musical programs were much milder than her later work, celebrating things like art, ethnic and cultural diversity, and the Civil Rights Movement. 

Many articles about the Mapplethorpe obscenity case trivialize Reisman's songwriting career, but it actually was more substantial than you might think. She collaborated with well-known folk artists, released a number of records, contributed to a number of children's television shows (mostly local ones), and was featured in the influential folk magazine Broadside.


Her first record, An Appeal to Conscience, was released in 1965 and dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. It contained two songs, "For the Dignity of Man" (a salute to Lyndon B. Johnson) and "Where Freedom Ends" (a salute to Martin Luther King Jr.). Reisman wrote "Where Freedom Ends" by herself, but on "For the Dignity of Man," she collaborated with folk veterans Stu Jamieson and Bill Cunningham. The record was the only release of CRM (presumably "Civil Rights Movement") Records.


In 1965 she also copyrighted several other original songs: "The Inconstant Lover," "Fishin'," "The Last Supper," "Warmth," "The Brazilian Fruit Vender," and "The German Psyche."

Reisman told the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle that her song "The Ballad of Annie Hayes" was named one of the best of 1965 by Les Claypool (the Los Angeles disc jockey, not the Primus bass player). The sheet music for the song appeared in the folk magazine Broadside, and the article provided an address where readers could write for information about Reisman's album, New Sounds By Judy Reisman.

"The Ballad of Annie Hayes," which is not included on the album, expressed Reisman's outrage over the real-life story of a 16-year-old Georgia girl who was raped and killed.

In 1966 Reisman performed 12 original folk songs on KPFK in Los Angeles, but thereafter, she moved to Milwaukee when her husband was offered a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

She continued to compose folk songs, and in 1967 copyrighted a song called "Judah Maccabee" and one called "Hazy Day," the latter of which featured music by Dick Hieronymus.

Her collaboration with Hieronymus is interesting. Hieronymus did quite a bit of session work with big-name artists in his career and participated in the 1973 session for John Lennon's "Since My Baby Left Me." In 1976 he recorded a children's album, Songs of Meter Park, with Jimmy Vann, which was a Schoolhouse Rock-type educational album of songs about the metric system, such as "I Like to Weigh With Kilograms." Ironically, in the context of today's blog post, he also co-wrote the themes of the 1978 adult films I Am Always Ready and Love Airlines.

While in Wisconsin, Reisman created musical segments for the children's television programs Children's Fair (a public television show on channel 10 in Milwaukee) and Merry-Go-Round (an Ohio program).

In 1968, Reisman wrote The Great Adventure, a musical play for television. The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle described it as a "history of American minorities: the Jew, the Indian, and Negro." She also performed a program for the Milwaukee Public Museum, Strange But True, which concerned "problems with conservation." She continued to be featured on KPFK in Los Angeles, where she performed an original musical story that year, A History of the Jewish People. 

1969 saw the release of Reisman's Daytime Nighttime, a filmstrip with a 7" EP that was released by Scholastic Records to encourage art appreciation among children. The songs highlighted works of art with daytime or nighttime imagery by artists such as Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Henri Rousseau. 

In the 1970s, on the strength of her work on Children's Fair and Merry-Go-Round, Reisman got a job writing musical segments for the long-running national children's show Captain Kangaroo. The gig came to an end, Reisman claims, when her "thoughtful tunes" proved to be no match for cartoon violence in capturing the attention of children. With seemingly nowhere else to go in her musical career, she went back to school to study communications and started on her path to becoming an anti-sex crusader with odd views such as blaming the Holocaust on homosexuals.

As for the Mapplethorpe case, Mapplethorpe won, and a 25-year retrospective on the obscenity trial in the Washington Post called the court battle "a PR disaster" for Cincinnati. David Mann, who was one of the City Council members at the time, said, "It kind of made us the laughing stock of sophisticated communities."