Sex in the City

National Review Online, December 3, 2002

There's a gift shop at the entrance to New York's new Museum of Sex with "edible body chocolate," "Kama Sutra" oils, nudie pens, and books such as New York Girls, Fetish Girls, Forbidden Erotica, Strip Flips, Peek — Photographs from the Kinsey Institute, The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, and Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist — but none of this was enough for one downtown Jezebel, grumpy in Winona black as she gazed idly at pictures of Bob Flanagan's tortured form. "You'd think," she grumbled, "that there would be more here than this. There ought to be, like, you know, toys." After all the foreplay — the carding (no one under 18 allowed), the $17 admission ticket (now there's an obscenity), the bawdy, giggling anticipation, the titillating costume (all visitors are issued with a self-adhesive scarlet "X"), and the come-hither enticement (the museum's advertising features boots, spurs, and a very, very short skirt), was this a first hint that the actual Museum of Sex experience might, well, fall a little flat?

The museum, which opened in October, is located, appropriately enough, near a street corner. It's on 27th and 5th, just to the east of the old "Satan's circus," Manhattan's former Tenderloin district, in a slightly shabby building that may once have known some very shabby times: There's fevered talk that it was used as a brothel. The interior — whitewashed walls, bare floors, and (cathouse chic?) bead curtains — is almost as drab. Perhaps the austerity is designed to emphasize the seriousness of the museum's "mission": "breaking new ground in an area of human life that…museums…have previously treated at best with benign neglect. This… includes the consideration of both high and low sexual culture (in all their endlessly fascinating manifestations)…" High culture? Who cares about that? I was there for the low (in all its endlessly fascinating manifestations). The academic flummery is best seen as a disguise, camouflage for the peepshow, a scholar's gown for those too prim to be seen in a dirty gray raincoat.

But back to that "mission" — according to the museum's publicity materials, its inaugural exhibition, NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America is devoted to an investigation of "the sexual subcultures of the city's past and present, and…the means by which they have influenced the development of modern attitudes about sex and sexuality." It's an appropriately narcissistic theme for a perennially self-absorbed city (or, more accurately, borough — the references to queens in this exhibition have nothing to do with Archie Bunker's old stamping ground). It comes with a flattering subtext: Out there in the sticks, the rubes, the birds and the bees were stuck doing it the same old way until those enlightened and sophisticated Manhattan folk started spreading the news.

That said, the first part of the exhibition is dedicated to prostitution, a business that even New Yorkers cannot claim to have invented. On this topic, the museum's main emphasis is on the 19th century: its most beguiling feature an interactive display highlighting extracts from Zagat-style guides to Manhattan's whorehouses, clearly a necessity for anyone wishing to avoid the perils of locales such as 14 Mercer Street, an unsavory joint where "gentlemen are never known to call a second time."

There's more to see than hooker handbooks, of course, not least a mummified penis, a chorus girl's costume, and a skull rotted by syphilis, but the real delight lies not in curios but in absorbing the details of this lost city of sin, a Gomorrah on the Hudson that had, in its downtown "fairy resorts," a suggestion of Sodom too. To be frank, though, this evidence of Victorian vice mainly comes across as a little bland. The passing of time and large amounts of soft sepia coloring mask both its erotic force and the brutality and squalor that must have lain not so far below it. All that remains is surface strangeness, best seen in a 1890s illustration of the Bowery by night, teeming, exotic, and menacing with more than a hint of a Blade Runner streetscape about it.

When the museum's visitors arrive in those sections of the exhibition that deal with the 20th century, improved photographic techniques literally bring the picture, and the reality behind it, into far clearer focus. This is just as well if the show is to hold our attention. Age can lend fascination to the most banal of knick-knacks, but once we reach the modern era there is not much in the way of alluring artifacts for the museum to display. An old tin of Ramses may be vaguely "Egyptian," but it's not exactly the treasure of Tutankhamen. Brave attempts are made: Exhibits include some nasty-looking bondage gear, a poster for the Village People and a 1971 handbook used to instruct the police on how to identify "toilet snipes," but a showcase featuring a forlorn pile of vintage peepshow tokens is a reminder why photography has to be an essential resource for this exhibition.

But, in a museum looking to chronicle behavior at its most intimate, this becomes, paradoxically, a problem. It's simply not that often that couples bring a camera into the bedroom and, unless they are a Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, it's even more unusual for the rest of us to see the results. Every type of picture can tell a story, but when it comes to recording this area of human conduct, the paintbrush can be more effective than the lens. It's surprising how little art is included in this show. The heavy reliance on photography inevitably shifts the exhibition's balance away from the private sphere to public — or quasi-public — displays of sexuality, primarily pin-ups, pornography, and an orgy or two; interesting enough, but something of a caricature. We are shown more, but, somehow, it feels like less. It is an impression only heightened by a selection of photographs more weighted towards, shall we say, the mechanics of this show's subject matter than its broader social context. This is not history, just a vision of the past reflected in a funhouse mirror.

This doesn't always matter. That part of the exhibition concerned with New York's contribution to 1970s pornography succeeds on its own terms. As porn is never meant to be anything more than dirty pix there is no intimacy to lose. Spectacle is simply replayed as spectacle, and becomes the source of the museum's most entertaining sight — small groups of visitors earnestly clustered around monitors showing continuous loops of disco era smut. As the crowd gawped at the gropers, portable audio guides related the (forgive the phrase) blow-by-blow reminiscences of a star from that time, Vanessa del Rio — the "Latin from Manhattan," reduced, these days, to Brooklyn.

To see how a display lined with photographs can fail as a record of the history of sex, check out the installation devoted to S&M. It is redeemed only by the revelation that the ranks of the spanked received a significant boost from the arrival of refugees from Nazi Germany, a place where sadism was no fantasy. For the most part, however, this segment of the show is, ahem, dominated by pin-ups of the pinioned, the pummeled, and the trussed, posed by professionals and packaged by profiteers. These pictures tell a picaresque tale (the saga of Irving Klaw, bondage entrepreneur, cries out for a Tim Burton movie), but they are far from enlightening. They record not authenticity, but performance. On the other hand, having also glanced at the museum's small, but painful (holy urethra!), sample of the undeniably authentic Mapplethorpe oeuvre, I'm not inclined to complain too much.

When the museum turns its attention to homosexuality, the results are somewhat better. Whether it's in the bleak camera work of Thomas Painter, the Brassai of Manhattan's mid-century gay demimonde, or in plain brown envelope beefcake photos (including one of a naked Yul Brynner — the real shock is his full head of hair) from the 1940s and 1950s, pseudo-exotic, claustrophobic, and vaguely ill at ease, the impact of that era's repression is obvious. Later came the Stonewall riot (visitors can study the Village Voice's remarkable report of that "fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen") and then the Dionysian 1970s (exhibits include a board game, "Gay Weekend," featuring Scott, Billy, Mark, Glen, Terry, Ritchie, a beach, a bar, and a truck stop). Inevitably, there's also an installation designed to describe the horror of the plague years that followed.

What we are never really shown is the gradual acceptance of gays into "respectable" society, an omission typical of an exhibition that consistently confuses the extreme with the cutting edge, and also tends to neglect the mainstream by much more than the show's stated purpose would suggest. That's a distortion of the historical record even for supposedly go-ahead Gotham, and it has another disadvantage. The exaggerated emphasis on the far out, and the touch of Coney Island that it brings to this exhibition, reinforces the sense of alienation and emotional distance already implicit in viewing images of other people's sex lives. For all the low culture thrills, I left the museum lost in mild, but oddly persistent melancholy.

Post-coital depression by proxy? I doubt it. Intriguing, prurient and more than a little kitsch, the Museum of Sex is certainly worth trying but you won't need a cigarette afterwards.