New York’s newest museum is a discreet affair, the architectural equivalent of a plain brown wrapper.
The windows facing Fifth Avenue are opalescent to discourage peepers, and the entrance is around the corner on a side street, so museum visitors can slip in and out without attracting stares.
Tasteful lettering at knee-level reveals that behind these milk-white windows is a place devoted to the birds and bees. But this isn’t a natural history museum. It’s the Museum of Sex.
“Sex is wonderful, and it’s here to stay,” purrs a former stripper on the museum’s audioguide. “I guarantee it.”
Whether the Museum of Sex–MoSex, as it has dubbed itself–is also here to stay is another question.
Claiming to be the first American museum devoted to the subject, MoSex is attempting to walk an almost impossibly fine line. It wants to present serious scholarship about what academics call the history of sexuality. That includes not just shifting attitudes about sex but also such related matters as prostitution, birth control and AIDS, all of which are covered in the museum’s first exhibition, which opened last month.
But the museum’s narrow galleries also brim with photos and films of naked men and women in a variety of geometrically arresting postures.
“We’re clearly an educational institution,” said Daniel Gluck, MoSex’s founder.
But, “we believe pornography is a form of popular culture, like Levi’s or Coca-Cola,” he added. “We want to take this material and give it its proper place.”
Public opinion may be fiercely divided on what that place is, but the museum’s opening exhibit leaves little room for doubt that the right location for a sex museum is New York. Called “NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America,” the exhibit recounts nearly 200 years of sex and scandal in the Big Apple, from the sensational 1836 ax murder of prostitute Helen Jewett to former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s battles to close porn shops in Times Square.
“We tried to show how sexual subcultures formed and how New York became Sodom on the Hudson,” said Gluck, 34, a former computer entrepreneur who spent more than four years bringing MoSex to fruition.
Shortly after the completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s made New York the major American port, the city acquired its reputation as Sin City, a place open to all sexual permutations.
One display case features an 1855 guide to New York’s bordellos, intended for the city’s “sporting gentlemen.”
Miss Kate Ridgely’s establishment on Duane Street, two blocks from City Hall, is described as a “palace of mirrors” where business is conducted in “beautiful style.” Down the street, however, is a competitor whose young ladies “possess not a single allure to charm a gentleman of taste.”
But the city has been more than a setting for the salacious. Important free-speech and women’s rights struggles played out in the city’s courtrooms and streets.
New York was the home not only of Margaret Sanger, who helped coin the phrase “birth control” and worked to make contraceptives more readily available, but also of her nemesis, Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who deemed contraceptives obscene because he believed they would lead to promiscuity.
Trove of titillation
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In 33 years of raiding art galleries, newsstands and other businesses, Comstock compiled a store of obscene material that, as Loyola University Chicago historian Timothy Gilfoyle notes, probably would have been lost otherwise. Some of the items on display at MoSex are from the Comstock lode.
Still, does lust really run more rampant in New York than in other cities? What about San Francisco, home of the Summer of Love in 1967? Or Chicago, whose Everleigh Club was nationally famous as a high-class brothel at the turn of the last century? A Playboy bunny waitress outfit on display at MoSex serves as a reminder that Hugh Hefner’s magazine is still published in Chicago.
New York beats them all, argues Gilfoyle, the author of a history of 19th Century prostitution in New York and a member of MoSex’s academically heavy advisory board.
“It’s in the nature of the city, being the center of so much population movement and the center of the media and entertainment industries, to play the role of changing the way the country thinks about sex,” he said. “Examples like Margaret Sanger and Anthony Comstock really do put New York in the center of a national story.”
Even the modern condom industry owes a large debt to New York. In the late 19th Century, immigrant Julius Schmid realized that surplus sausage casings could be sewn up at one end to make prophylactics. Schmid’s business lives on, marketing Ramses and other brands.
Later exhibits tell the story of the city’s thriving gay and lesbian communities, as well as such fetishes as sadomasochism, which was introduced in New York in the 1930s and 1940s when practitioners fled Nazi-occupied Europe.
And tape loops from 1970s movies such as “Deep Throat” illustrate how the city was the center of the pornographic film industry until the mid-1980s, when producers left for Southern California.
Gluck hit upon the idea for a sex museum by chance. After selling a software company in the mid-1990s, he was casting around for a new project when friends recounted a visit to an Amsterdam sex museum. But European sex museums tend to be little more than glorified sex shops. He thought there was a place for a serious museum, a view Gilfoyle shares.
In the last 20 years, the field of sexual history has expanded rapidly, to the point that the University of Chicago publishes an academic journal devoted to the subject.
“Sex has a history,” Gilfoyle said. “It just didn’t start when we were born.”
But the museum had a bumpy birth. Plans to build a new museum structure collapsed with the stock market, and later a state agency turned down Gluck’s request for non-profit status.
Could be a hot spot
MoSex, which has drawn more than 12,000 visitors since it opened, is housed in a modest five-story building on an undistinguished stretch of Fifth Avenue near Madison Square. Appropriately, the neighborhood was once part of New York’s Tenderloin district of saloons, gambling dens and bordellos.
For that matter, even the building seemed to have a disreputable past. After Gluck and a group of investors bought it in the late 1990s, they discovered a series of private cubicles in a massage parlor on the top floor, leading them to speculate that the museum was not the first tenant of the building centered on sex.
Even before the museum opened, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which sided with Giuliani in his battles over displays of art he deemed offensive at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, labeled it the “Museum of Smut,” or “MoSmut.”
But most of the museum’s critics have charged that the exhibition is not racy enough, especially for the hefty $17 admission. “Boring,” read one critique in the museum’s comment book, predicting MoSex would be “closed within the year.”
Gluck understands the visitor’s point, but he defends the museum’s decision to start with a relatively academic approach to its subject.
“We started with a historic exhibit to show what we mean by a museum of sex,” he said. “In our concern not to be perceived as leaning toward the titillating or pornographic side, we erred on the other side. If that means we’re not the most exciting place, so be it.”