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My afternoon at Barnes & Noble in Kingston, NY

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Blog, By Georganne Chapin
July 1, 2025

My afternoon at Barnes & Noble in Kingston, NY, June 21, 2025

I had a great afternoon on Saturday, June 21, at Barnes & Noble in Kingston, New York. Thanks to a friendly store policy hosting local authors (I live just 10 minutes from Kingston), I manned (womanned!) a table displaying my book This Penis Business: A Social Activist’s Memoir, and Marilyn Milos’s book, Please Don’t Cut the Baby: A Nurse’s Memoir. Also on hand were booklets from Intact America’s Skin In the Game photo and story-telling campaign. There was no shortage of shoppers curious to hear about the U.S. circumcision business and how I became an intactivist.

The B&N staff (Jamie, the manager and her assistant Heather) were cordial and helpful. They advertised the event in the store’s online newsletter and also displayed a poster that designer Jan Sharrow had created for my book appearances. On the day-of, they set me up at a table about halfway between the store entrance and the children’s section in the back. More than one person lurking in the nearby cookbook section seemed to be paying equal attention to my conversations with customers curious to hear about my book.

A few days before the event, Intact America had sent out an email to IA followers in the Kingston area. When I arrived, a man named Andrew told me, “I’ve been waiting for you.” (EEK) Thankfully, though he was a fan of our cause; he teaches an online course on spirituality and opposition to circumcision is part of the curriculum. He bought a book!

Another visitor told me her 15-year-old son was mad that she hadn’t allowed him to be circumcised (“He feels he’s the only one,” she said). She told me she’s a biologist, and she kept her son intact because she believes there’s no such thing as an unnecessary body part. As we chatted, I realized that she hadn’t talked in depth with her son about her reasons for keeping him intact, and suggested she share with her son that wanted to protect him from pain and trauma, as well as preserving his future autonomy. I hope she does that. (She bought a book, too!)

Yet another visitor to the table was a man who looked to be in his late 40s. “My parents were hippies,” he said. “They didn’t circumcise me and I didn’t circumcise my son.”  He took a Skin in the Game booklet and book-ordering information for later.

I’m looking forward to more of these opportunities (in bookstores and at book festivals) in the coming months. I love opportunities to talk one-on-one with people who are genuinely interested in this topic—the genital cutting of minor boys and its personal and societal consequences. I encourage everyone reading this to have the same kind of conversations—open, up-close and personal.

If you’d like to arrange a reading or appearance at a bookstore in your area, please reach out to Intact America directly at [email protected]

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Marilyn

Marilyn Fayre Milos, multiple award winner for her humanitarian work to end routine infant circumcision in the United States and advocating for the rights of infants and children to genital autonomy, has written a warm and compelling memoir of her path to becoming “the founding mother of the intactivist movement.” Needing to support her family as a single mother in the early sixties, Milos taught banjo—having learned to play from Jerry Garcia (later of The Grateful Dead)—and worked as an assistant to comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce, typing out the content of his shows and transcribing court proceedings of his trials for obscenity. After Lenny’s death, she found her voice as an activist as part of the counterculture revolution, living in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, and honed her organizational skills by creating an alternative education open classroom (still operating) in Marin County. 

After witnessing the pain and trauma of the circumcision of a newborn baby boy when she was a nursing student at Marin College, Milos learned everything she could about why infants were subjected to such brutal surgery. The more she read and discovered, the more convinced she became that circumcision had no medical benefits. As a nurse on the obstetrical unit at Marin General Hospital, she committed to making sure parents understood what circumcision entailed before signing a consent form. Considered an agitator and forced to resign in 1985, she co-founded NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers) and began organizing international symposia on circumcision, genital autonomy, and human rights. Milos edited and published the proceedings from the above-mentioned symposia and has written numerous articles in her quest to end circumcision and protect children’s bodily integrity. She currently serves on the board of directors of Intact America.

Georganne

Georganne Chapin is a healthcare expert, attorney, social justice advocate, and founding executive director of Intact America, the nation’s most influential organization opposing the U.S. medical industry’s penchant for surgically altering the genitals of male children (“circumcision”). Under her leadership, Intact America has definitively documented tactics used by U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities to pathologize the male foreskin, pressure parents into circumcising their sons, and forcibly retract the foreskins of intact boys, creating potentially lifelong, iatrogenic harm. 

Chapin holds a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College, and a Master’s degree in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. For 25 years, she served as president and chief executive officer of Hudson Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicaid insurer in New York’s Hudson Valley. Mid-career, she enrolled in an evening law program, where she explored the legal and ethical issues underlying routine male circumcision, a subject that had interested her since witnessing the aftermath of the surgery conducted on her younger brother. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Pace University School of Law in 2003, and was subsequently admitted to the New York Bar. As an adjunct professor, she taught Bioethics and Medicaid and Disability Law at Pace, and Bioethics in Dominican College’s doctoral program for advanced practice nurses.

In 2004, Chapin founded the nonprofit Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality, a company that designs software and provides consulting services designed to reduce administrative complexities, streamline and integrate data collection and reporting, and enhance access to care for those in need. In 2008, she co-founded Intact America.

Chapin has published many articles and op-ed essays, and has been interviewed on local, national and international television, radio and podcasts about ways the U.S. healthcare system prioritizes profits over people’s basic needs. She cites routine (nontherapeutic) infant circumcision as a prime example of a practice that wastes money and harms boys and the men they will become. This Penis Business: A Memoir is her first book.