New Museum in NYC

“September 19, 2002
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

MoSex, the new Museum of Sex, five years in the making and
opening next week in a former retail space and (reputedly)
a recent brothel on Fifth Avenue and 27th Street, is not
taking its X rating lying down.

Though carefully located at least 500 feet away from any
church or school and exhibiting enough pornography to draw
condemnation as MoSmut from the Catholic League for
Religious and Civil Rights, it bids to be taken seriously,
say its organizers, who call it the first institution in
the United States to bring the study of sex to a popular
audience.

And where else could it go, said Daniel Gluck, its
34-year-old executive director and a former painter,
sculptor and computer entrepreneur, but New York, "a city
bold enough, big enough, bad enough, bizarre enough and
brazen enough to have a sexual history unlike that of any
other."

Operating by default as a for-profit corporation after the
state Board of Regents declined to charter it as a cultural
nonprofit organization, the museum opens at 233 Fifth
Avenue on Sept. 28 with "NYC Sex: How New York City
Transformed Sex in America."

Its bylaws rule out financial backing from anyone in "the
adult entertainment industry," Mr. Gluck said. He said that
about 20 investors had put up several million dollars - he
declined to be precise - and said that if attendance
reached the hoped-for 100,000 visitors a year, the museum
could turn a profit in six months.

Sensation and controversy there might be, said Grady
Turner, the executive curator and former director of
exhibits at the New-York Historical Society. But he added:
"It's not just a lot of pretty white women having sex." The
loftier mission, he said, was exploring "the sexual
subcultures of the city and how they influenced the
mainstream."

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, did not
wait for the opening to issue a statement this week calling
some of the academic contributors pornographers and
suggesting the museum include "a death chamber that would
acknowledge all the wretched diseases that promiscuity has
caused." Mr. Gluck did not seem surprised. "Great," he said
wearily when told of the statement. "It's their privilege,
but I'm upset they're speaking without seeing it."

Yet, many of the museum's themes are already available on
its Web site (www.museumofsex.com) and depicted in a boldly
illustrated catalog of the first show. The catalog also has
a series of provocative conversations between Mr. Turner,
scholars and people in the sex business.

The show (admission $17) draws on its many scholarly
contributors and rich stores of archival material to
illuminate the city's bawdy past. Exhibits detail the gay
resorts of the Bowery in the late 1800's, the antivice
crusade of the zealous young store clerk named Anthony
Comstock, the pornography and fetishist trades, the
political mobilization of gays and lesbians, and an
apotheosis of public and orgiastic sex that turned into a
health disaster when, as the cartoonist Art Spiegelman says
in the show catalog, "AIDS was the bill brought to the
banquet table."

A large and eclectic cast is arrayed over three galleries
covering more than 5,000 square feet on the first two
floors of the five-story building. Mr. Turner said cubicles
were unexpectedly discovered on the top floor, suggesting
the use of the premises as a brothel as recently as the
1990's.

Here are Helen Jewett, a 23-year-old prostitute whose
murder in 1836 exposed the city's early commercial sex
industry; the eugenicist and birth control advocate
Margaret Sanger; and the early abortionist, Madame Restell.
She was hounded to death, literally, by Comstock, whose
relentless pursuit and documentation of the city's sexual
underworld preserved it for future historians and
sexologists.

Here are Julius Schmid, an impoverished paralytic from
Germany who in 1883 turned his expertise making sausage
casings into the lucrative sideline of supplying condoms,
then illegal but later widely sold under the Ramses brand
name. Here are the pinup king Irving Klaw and the G-string
king Charles Guyette, the fetishist models Bettie Page and
Marie Jarroff, the erotica publisher Sam Roth, the
sex-change pioneer Christine Jorgensen, the sex guru and
Happy Hooker Xaviera Hollander, the pornography film stars
Linda Lovelace and Annie Sprinkle, and Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman?

"She was always tying people up and
spanking someone," Mr. Turner said, leafing through a
60-year-old comic in the exhibition that he said depicted
the cartoon character - inspired by Elizabeth Holloway
Marston, wife of its creator, William Marston - in lesbian
and sadomasochistic guises.

As the exhibition is arranged, visitors start with the
murder of Helen Jewett and file past a graphic anatomy
exhibit of the kind shown to 19th-century audiences
supposedly as a warning about the evils of sexual
profligacy.

There are displays of burlesque costumes and then showcases
on the vice control movement, including sexually explicit
French postcards assiduously collected by Comstock to show
how blatant the wickedness had become.

Continuing on the second floor, the exhibition spans the
shifting boundaries of pornography, from the novels of D.
H. Lawrence to so-called Tijuana Bibles - small booklets of
pornographic cartoons - and early stag films. It moves to a
section called "Bizarre" - fetishism and sadomasochistic
culture - and then to "Ecstasy" - the high point of the
sexual revolution with sex clubs like "Plato's Retreat" and
the growing mainstream audience for pornographic films like
"Deep Throat."

Here one section displays clips from some of the films,
with the stars, including Vanessa del Rio, providing
commentary on audiotape.

"I was always cast as a tart or something, some like sexual
animal of sorts," Ms. del Rio says. "I was the only Spanish
woman or woman of color of those days, so they cast me as
some hot spitfire or something."

The exhibition ends with "Safe," the AIDS era and how it
changed all that had gone before. Before leaving, visitors
may step up to computers tucked into little booths to see
"1001 Nights" - the stories of love and sex in the city
left by others - or to add their own stories to the
archive.

Then they may browse in the gift shop, stocked largely with
books, not sex accouterments. Contrary to early reports,
Mr. Gluck said, there is no restaurant or cafe, let alone
one featuring aphrodisiacs.

A fine arts graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with
a business degree from the Wharton School, Mr. Gluck said
he got the idea of a sex museum in 1997 after selling the
modest computer software company he had founded, Franklin
Computing, and investing in real estate. He acquired 233
Fifth Avenue and with a former college friend, Alison
Maddex, an artist and curator and the companion of the
feminist writer Camille Paglia, decided that it would make
a fine sex museum, patterned, perhaps, after similar
institutions in Europe but more serious.

A "suburban father with a 2-year-old son," as he described
himself, he said not everything in the museum was to his
taste. "Sure I'm uncomfortable with some of the porn," he
said, "but if it has historical significance, it belongs
there."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/arts/design/19SEX.html?ex=1033452289&ei=1&en=cf35fe03b113a977”

“"MoSex," i love it, i love it!! that name is too freakin' funny. and the whole museum sounds like a great idea!”

“and 13% of the people are having sex with strangers in the Museum”

“Sausage casings?”

“yes Lyra we are so proud of our new Museum.




still can't understand why?????”

“What, Violin, not up on the historical significance and origins of condoms?”

“im surprised it took this long.”

“17$!?”

“Now I understand why Giuliani chased all the 25 cent peep shows out of Times Square. There's no way the could charge $17 with that kind of competition.”

“sorry, but all I have to do to see naked people and sex is walk out my front door!




I LOVE NY”