Grady Turner, curator of the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Sex in New York City, emailed me: “I’m glad you are having such a good time, and sharing it! Let me know if you ever get back to the Museum of Sex. I’d love to hear what you think of the exhibition. And let me know if you read the book. Meanwhile, I’m a fan.”
I just finished reading the NYC SEX book companion to the Museum of Sex inaugural exhibition. I thought you really painted a vivid picture of the NY sex culture during the past two centuries. With the violence and repression of the time, women like Mae West shine like stars to me, almost a hundred years later. I want to thank you for sharing their inspiring stories and photos.
I think it’s interesting that your book covers a whole era in NY sexuality, and you published it (and the Museum of Sex opened) at the point in NY’s history that seems to me like a “blank slate or canvas.” 9-11 was the turning point, but even before then, Guiliani has “cleaned up” Times Square, commercial porn has moved to Hollywood, the internet has made it so that publishing (at least internet publishing – the dissemination of information) is increasingly becoming decentralized as every living room in the world becomes equipped with this power.
It makes me really curious about what’s next for NY’s sex scene, what the hell, the global sex scene in the 21st century. It’s hard to predict, but what’s exciting is that we’re IT! A hundred years from now people will be writing about what we’re doing now. It blows my mind!
PS. I just have to disagree with Gene Simmons. The Ramones, in their relative poverty, has influenced American music more by inspiring hundreds of bands that then came after and became as mainstream as Kiss was. Just being petty ;-D… but I do love The Ramones and Lou Reed.
Hi May,
Thanks for your thoughtful note. I think most people pick up my book for the dirty pictures; it’s nice to know it’s also being read. That it is being read with perception is so much the better.
Like you, I was fascinated to learn more about Mae West. Like most people, I had categorized her as the camp figure we inherited in pop culture. When you go back to understand how she constructed her persona and created her notoriety, you have to be impressed. With Mae West–as with Blaze Starr, Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee–you find performers who worked for decades with notions of female sexuality beyond the stereotypical restrictions of youth and beauty. This generation deserves better study and recognition.
You are dead on about Gene Simmons. He’s such a creep! My brothers and I were great Kiss fans back in the day, so I was glad to interview him. But he’s by nature a self-promoter and contrarian–if you say the sky is blue, he will argue that the sky is not blue, has never been blue, and besides, Kiss was blue before the sky even considered it. And once he dissed the Ramones and the New York Dolls, I realized I was dealing with someone who’s standard of excellence is defined by what he has achieved.
But didn’t you love that he looked down on fetish as dressing up in silly costumes? I mean, HELLO! After I did this interview, someone gave me a CD of his interview with Teri Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” It was a perfect disaster. They hated each other.
You are right that it is an amazing time to be working on sex and sexuality. It’s thrilling that we are able to meet pioneers like Xaviera Hollander or Charles Gatewood, even as we can talk with young people who have never met them, but take for granted the cultural shifts they innovated. So much has happened in our recent history.
I am just old enough (and was precocious enough) to have been sexually active in the aftermath of the free love era, and before the advent of AIDS, not to mention the Internet. What I recall of those years helped me to understand the experiences of people much older than me, and what I know of those shifted paradigms helped me to relate to those younger than me. And I suppose that informs what I find so engaging about our work now. We can operate as intermediaries for our audiences, informing and titillating, perhaps, as we make our own contributions to this rich field.