October 28, 2025
Readers, see below information about SEX RADICAL, an upcoming film about Ida Craddock, a Progressive-Era sex educator and frequent antagonist to Anthony Comstock. If you missed our recent publication of the JGAPE forum on Comstock, you can read it here.
A new documentary-drama about Ida Craddock, a pioneer in the struggle for free expression and gender equality, will be available for free streaming from Oct. 31 – Nov. 4 at bit.ly/sexradicalstream
Historians of the Gilded Age are certainly familiar with the nefarious deeds of the evangelical “vice-hunter,” Anthony Comstock, but they may not know the story of Ida Craddock, a sex educator, scholar, and sexual mystic who challenged Comstock face-to-face, and who inspired her contemporaries by her courage. SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner tells Craddock’s remarkable story. It will premiere at the end of this month, both theatrically and online.
Though arrested multiple times under the Comstock Act, sentenced to prison, committed to an asylum, and forced to turn over her sex education pamphlets for burning, Craddock was undeterred in her fight for women’s sexual equality and her own First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. The feminist icon, Emma Goldman, called her “one of the bravest champions of Women’s Emancipation,” and Craddock’s was the very first case to be taken up by the Free Speech League, a forerunner to modern civil liberties groups like the ACLU and PEN America
Drawing on archival documents—including diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and the preeminent “sex radical” periodicals of the time—Kirshner used Craddock’s own words as the basis for the screenplay. The tale of her nine-year personal struggle against Comstock’s censorship is recounted through a unique mixture of archival film, eyewitness testimony, dream sequences, and stylized reenactments.
Speaking of the film’s relevance for our own time, Kirshner says,
“When I first started working on SEX RADICAL, I was struck, not only by Ida Craddock’s powerful story, but also by how closely the “culture wars” of the late nineteenth century resemble the “culture wars” of today. Those social conflicts were also largely about sexuality and gender, and about the role that religion should or should not play in public life. But frankly, I never dreamed that the 1873 Comstock “obscenity” Law would be experiencing a revival in 2025! It’s astonishing—but maybe not so astonishing if one takes a longer view of American History.”
After its theatrical premiere in Ann Arbor on Oct. 30, SEX RADICAL will be available to stream worldwide, FOR FREE, from Oct. 31 – Nov. 4, 2025. Viewers can register now for their free ticket and will receive an email reminder when the film goes live. For questions and/or to discuss bringing the film to your school or non-profit organization, contact producer Brenna Murphy at brenna@newhistoryfilms.com.
Chelsea is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the SHGAPE Blog and a GAPE historian with a specialty in US-Russia relations and women’s history. She is the Director of the Binghamton Codes! Program at Binghamton University. Her research examines the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States between 1878 and 1920. She also serves on the board of the Phelps Mansion Museum, a Gilded Age museum located in Binghamton, NY.