Sex Museum to Open in September

[CrimsonTide4]

Sex and the City Get a New Museum
First Exhibit Lays Bare Gotham's Carnal Tastes
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 23, 2002; Page A03


NEW YORK -- The city known as Sodom by the Hudson is about to have a museum celebrating its libidinous reputation.

New York City gave a young nation its first look at a press-fueled sex scandal, at S&M clubs and gay and lesbian bars, and at the modern porno industry, not to mention the humble condom.

Now New York City gives the nation its first Museum of Sex.

The museum, known as MoSex to the cognoscenti, is readying for its kickoff Sept . 23 with an exhibit titled: "How New York City Transformed Sex in America." Serious but not too much so, with a board full of prominent historians, MoSex takes a unleering but frank look at Gotham's carnal appetites.

"We're going to be the Smithsonian of sex," said Dan Gluck, MoSex's entrepreneurial executive director. "We want high and low culture, and we plan to inform without boring you to tears."

The museum, on Fifth Avenue and 27th Street, will feature a parade of the unzippered and those who crusaded to zip it up. Its subjects run from Mae West -- whose first major play was decried as "the very nadir of decadence" and ended in her arrest -- to Linda Lovelace, who starred in the X-rated movie "Deep Throat."

There is the sexual revolution and AIDS and the anti-pornography feminists and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, who inveighed against immorality and XXX-theaters but also dressed in drag and appeared on "Saturday Night Live."

The museum's Web site has an interactive heaving-and-sighing map of New York. Click on and hear personal stories of the Rialto district, the Tenderloin and Plato's Retreat, where men and women repaired for sexual gymnastics in the 1970s.

"Our thesis is that New York has had a great impact on how the United States thinks about sex from the 1830s onwards," said Grady T. Turner, the museum's executive curator, who came here from the New York Historical Society, where he was director of exhibitions. "If you were gay or lesbian or part of a sexual subculture, New York was going to be your destination."

One might detect a whiff of New York parochialism in this claim to sexual centrality. Couldn't a languid demurral arise from New Orleans, which is so humid and so French?

Might not San Francisco argue that the Haight and the Castro give it claim to the satyr's title? And what of the San Fernando Valley, the national capital of the pornography industry?

Some might even argue, as a Brit journalist or two has already, that the fact that New York has a museum devoted to the sensual is a sure sign the city has become as risque as the Disney Store that sits astride Times Square.

"The mall-ification and Disneyfication of New York is real," said Turner as he sits in a small office backed by a volume of Anais Nin, not to mention videotapes such as "Deviant Desires." "The Hellfire Club now sits in the middle of bistros in the meat-packing district.

"But," Turner noted brightly, "when Giuliani left office, there were actually more sex clubs in the city than when he came in.

"This subject isn't going away."

Where the Nudes Are

"The first nude body you'll see is right here!"

Gluck, 33, the slightly frenetic founder of the soon-to-be-famous-if-he-has-anything-to-do-with-it Museum of Sex, is giving a tour of his building. Its design won a prestigious architecture award and kudos from the New York Times.

Having just reached the second floor, he paints a word picture of hanging panels and translucent screens and computer interactive everything. There will be scholarly texts, stag films, lots of photos and video, and a fetish rack or two.

The New York exhibit, which will be open to adults 18 and older, will begin with the much-publicized murder of a beautiful prostitute, Helen Jewett, in the 1830s. The computerized outline of her body becomes a map of the city's first great sex scandal. There is the subculture of sexually promiscuous young men brought to New York City by the Erie Canal. There is the burgeoning business of prostitution.

And there were New York's bawdy new penny-newspapers, which turned the trial of Jewett's murderer into a media bonfire. Ask Gluck how he came up with idea for MoSex, and he mentions a dinner. He had just sold his software business in the mid-1990s, and he wanted to try the next big thing. Why don't you found a Museum of Sex, suggested a friend.

"They all laughed; it was a joke," he said. "I thought it was pure inspiration.

"I mean, sex is a driving force of humanity, so why isn't there a Museum of Sex? There's a museum for rock 'n' roll, and modern art, and there's a even a cheese museum in upstate New York. So why not a serious approach to sex?"

Gluck began to raise millions of dollars. He received help from the Kinsey Institute and the Lesbian Herstory archives. He takes no money -- as a matter of his museum's bylaws -- from the pornography industry.

Some funders gagged on the name. "It's great that Dan went for the blunt name," Turner said. "It's just cowardice not to deal with the most basic of human subjects."

Gluck found his collection in expected places, and a few unexpected. The Kinsey Institute opened its voluminous archives to the museum, and Gluck borrowed from other collections, as well.

Then there's Ralph Whittington, a retired Library of Congress archivist widely recognized as possessing perhaps the world's largest collection of pornographic literature and film. His is a scholarly obsession, although he wouldn't deny he peruses the material.

"Being a librarian, I know how to keep these materials preserved," he said. "It's not easy being seen as a porn king."

Gluck has a similar problem when he talks of his museum. People do not see a balding father and husband with a fine arts degree and a suburban house.

"A woman will look at me and ask: 'So, Dan, like what's your thing?'"

He shrugs. "I say, 'Museums, I guess.' "

City With a Libido

To walk the exhibit, to read its books and talk to the curator, is to understand New York as a sexual outlier.

This is a burg built of mammon and fed by immigrants from a worldlier Europe. Its streets have always been rough, from the opening of the Erie Canal in the 1830s to the 1930s, when the Nazi threat in Europe sent the more daring of the Weimar intelligentsia fleeing westward. They brought expressionist art and theater, and sadomasochism clubs, too.

Then there was Julius Schmid, a poor immigrant from Germany. He eked out a living around New York by stuffing sausages, and developed a side business stitching casings into condoms for his fellow immigrants.

When, in the 1930s, the United States legalized condoms, he was ready with his patent for Ramses condoms. A fellow New Yorker and former bootlegger founded the Trojan brand.

"The sexual culture of New York is very entrepreneurial," Gluck said.

No doubt, although the reformers are often as energetic. There was Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 19th century and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s, and feminists such as Gloria Steinem, who in the 1980s argued that pornography degraded women.

But in New York, the more lurid the condemnations, the greater the curiosity. When crusaders decried Coney Island as a peninsular Sodom and Gomorrah, the mayor of Brooklyn protested:

"If this advertising goes on, Coney Island won't be big enough to hold the crowds that want to go there."

Gluck knows all this.

"It's yuck-yuck to the clueless, but sex sells in this city," Gluck said. "In our high-low cultural way, we're sort of proving that point, right?"


© 2002 The Washington Post Company