The New Institute for Sexual Technologies presents The Future of Life

Video. Runtime: 13:18. 2021.

A Brief Note on The Future of Life

The New Institute for Sexual Technologies was founded in 1988 by three Cantsin University alumni: Dr. Robin McKaye and married couple Dr. Esther Davis and Christopher Davis (later known as Christopher X Davis, Xopher Davis, and X). Headquartered just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, the New Institute was a think tank advocating for a new sexual revolution; “We’re going to make Kinsey look like kindergarten,” bragged an anonymous employee in an infamous 1988 Las Vegas Review-Journal article. Though they authored many papers and wide-ranging studies (most of which are now lost), the founders believed that the best way to promote their radical, Queer views on gender and sex was through the creation of educational films (most of which are also now lost).

The Future of Life (1992) holds a unique position in the New Institutes’ output. It is one of only a small handful of complete New Institute productions currently available, as well as their final project to include the credited participation of both McKaye and X Davis, though it appears that McKaye’s contributions to the production were minimal. It also marks a turning point in the New Institute’s focus, away from their earlier concentration on issues of sex, reproduction, and gender, and towards a holistic view of the body in its environment that X Davis termed “The New Body Paradigm.” While their earlier films had expressed optimism about the possibilities of transhumanism, The Future of Life is when that evangelical utopianism turned fanatical.

In a 1989 letter, X Davis addresses Dr. Esther Davis as “the Moses to my Aaron.” By the couple’s own view, X Davis was the New Institute’s public face, media advocate, and high priest, while Esther was its reticent, haunted heart and soul. Her despairing, whispered epilogue to The Future of Life, likely added to the film without X Davis’s knowledge, has no parallel in any other known New Institute production, though it bears some similarities in tone and syntax to her later pseudonymous poetry. While they never divorced, X Davis’s declining mental health and an affair between Esther and Dr. McKaye had strained the relationship. It appears that they never spoke again after the dissolution of the New Institute in 1994.

Beyond personal conflicts, it was already clear that the New Institute was doomed in 1993. They had been a target for far-right media since their formation, but the revelation that the institute had received ten thousand dollars in federal funds for a 1991 sexual health study conducted with the University of California, Berkley, brought an intense new level of scrutiny. The controversy led to Senate hearings in late 1993, and the New Institute’s fate was sealed.

Alone among the three founders, Dr. Robin McKaye was able to attain some semblance of professional stability in the scandal’s aftermath. After leaving the New Institute he returned to teaching at Cantsin University in Ohio, living a quiet, solitary life before dying of brain cancer in 2004. X Davis, whose erratic behavior at the Senate hearings had been widely derided, sunk into a cycle of drug addiction and involuntary institutionalizations. He died of an apparent suicide in 2001. Though she remains in contact with some former New Institute employees, Dr. Esther Davis changed her name in 1995 and prefers to live anonymously. I have been permitted to report that she works for an animal rescue and has self-published several books of erotic lesbian poetry.

- Keeva Lough, May, 2021