PookieMonster
Got bored & left 30/01/05
NEW YORK — Welcome to Gotham. Plenty of sex and plenty of museums in this city, so naturally this is the place to put the two together. Step right up, prepare to be intrigued, moved, maybe a little titillated, but you won't be bored at the Museum of Sex.
The city of world-class museums, grand libraries and splendid cultural centers meets its other half — the city of S&M clubs, triple-X theaters and Sex and the City — when the Museum of Sex opens the second week in October with a revealing exhibit of how New York transformed sex in America.
Now, before the eyes start rolling, consider this: America has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to peculiar museums — the Museum of Dirt in Boston, the Salt Museum in Syracuse, N.Y., the Museum of Cheese in Rome, N.Y. There are even two museums (in Kansas and Texas) dedicated to barbed wire.
So why not a museum of sex? More precisely, why not a museum that attempts to take a scholarly yet playful look at what founder Daniel Gluck calls "the driving force of humanity"?
"It struck me like a ton of bricks — there's nothing like this, of this caliber, anywhere in the world. That's like saying there's no museum of modern art in the world," says Gluck, 34, who made his fortune in computer software and has largely bankrolled the project.
MoSex, as it has been dubbed (in a tongue-in-cheek homage to MoMA, the occasionally sexy Museum of Modern Art), is housed in 15,000 square feet in an old building on Fifth Avenue at 27th Street. An early plan for a new building was abandoned as too expensive, but the old building is getting a new facade featuring curvy aluminum "ribs" and a Spandex-like "body" wrap. A century ago, the red-light neighborhood — then known as the Tenderloin district — was crowded with brothels, dance halls, saloons and theaters.
The museum's mission is "to show the significance of sex in the arts, culture and humanities," Gluck says. The opening exhibit, NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America, looks at how diverse sexual subcultures flourished in New York from the early 19th century, spread out and adapted, and eventually penetrated mainstream American culture in ways most people haven't noticed.
Take the leather-and-sex thing: It's not just a homosexual phenomenon, and it didn't originate in the 1960s, says Grady Turner, chief curator of the museum and former director of exhibitions at the New York Historical Society. In fact, he says, leather fetishists came to New York from Germany in the 1930s — fleeing the Nazis — and they were heterosexuals.
"You can draw a direct line from them to Cat Woman and Emma Peel (of TV's The Avengers) in their leather outfits," says Turner, whose ramshackle office is cluttered with scholarly tomes like The Encyclopedia of New York City and sex videos like Dracula Exotica.
"My job is to put these two things together," jokes Turner, grabbing the encyclopedia and the video and banging them against each other. No pun intended.
MoSex will be a history museum, not an art museum, although artworks are included in its permanent collection, which is growing. A retired Library of Congress archivist just gave the museum what is said to be the world's largest and most comprehensive archive of heterosexual pornography in literature and film. The museum has received most of its financial and material support from Gluck, private investors, the famous Kinsey Institute sex research center and the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
Visiting the museum will not be a cheap date: Admission is $17, and anyone under 17 must be accompanied by an adult. The museum needs the money because it has vowed to forgo donations from the porn industry and because mainstream donations are difficult to get. The studios and cable television networks that produce R-rated films and shows like Sex and the City and Real Sex are still afraid to be linked to a museum of sex.
So, for that matter, is the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees non-profit cultural institutions, and which refused to recognize the museum out of fear that its name would make a mockery of all museums. One anti-porn group, the Catholic League, attacked the museum for "celebrating reckless sex and moral pollution" and dismissed its historical aims as a sham. But the denunciations have had virtually no effect.
"We don't accept government or taxpayer funds, so we don't have to worry about (protests)," Gluck shrugs.
"In fact, we'll probably generate tax dollars for the city."
The city of world-class museums, grand libraries and splendid cultural centers meets its other half — the city of S&M clubs, triple-X theaters and Sex and the City — when the Museum of Sex opens the second week in October with a revealing exhibit of how New York transformed sex in America.
Now, before the eyes start rolling, consider this: America has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to peculiar museums — the Museum of Dirt in Boston, the Salt Museum in Syracuse, N.Y., the Museum of Cheese in Rome, N.Y. There are even two museums (in Kansas and Texas) dedicated to barbed wire.
So why not a museum of sex? More precisely, why not a museum that attempts to take a scholarly yet playful look at what founder Daniel Gluck calls "the driving force of humanity"?
"It struck me like a ton of bricks — there's nothing like this, of this caliber, anywhere in the world. That's like saying there's no museum of modern art in the world," says Gluck, 34, who made his fortune in computer software and has largely bankrolled the project.
MoSex, as it has been dubbed (in a tongue-in-cheek homage to MoMA, the occasionally sexy Museum of Modern Art), is housed in 15,000 square feet in an old building on Fifth Avenue at 27th Street. An early plan for a new building was abandoned as too expensive, but the old building is getting a new facade featuring curvy aluminum "ribs" and a Spandex-like "body" wrap. A century ago, the red-light neighborhood — then known as the Tenderloin district — was crowded with brothels, dance halls, saloons and theaters.
The museum's mission is "to show the significance of sex in the arts, culture and humanities," Gluck says. The opening exhibit, NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America, looks at how diverse sexual subcultures flourished in New York from the early 19th century, spread out and adapted, and eventually penetrated mainstream American culture in ways most people haven't noticed.
Take the leather-and-sex thing: It's not just a homosexual phenomenon, and it didn't originate in the 1960s, says Grady Turner, chief curator of the museum and former director of exhibitions at the New York Historical Society. In fact, he says, leather fetishists came to New York from Germany in the 1930s — fleeing the Nazis — and they were heterosexuals.
"You can draw a direct line from them to Cat Woman and Emma Peel (of TV's The Avengers) in their leather outfits," says Turner, whose ramshackle office is cluttered with scholarly tomes like The Encyclopedia of New York City and sex videos like Dracula Exotica.
"My job is to put these two things together," jokes Turner, grabbing the encyclopedia and the video and banging them against each other. No pun intended.
MoSex will be a history museum, not an art museum, although artworks are included in its permanent collection, which is growing. A retired Library of Congress archivist just gave the museum what is said to be the world's largest and most comprehensive archive of heterosexual pornography in literature and film. The museum has received most of its financial and material support from Gluck, private investors, the famous Kinsey Institute sex research center and the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
Visiting the museum will not be a cheap date: Admission is $17, and anyone under 17 must be accompanied by an adult. The museum needs the money because it has vowed to forgo donations from the porn industry and because mainstream donations are difficult to get. The studios and cable television networks that produce R-rated films and shows like Sex and the City and Real Sex are still afraid to be linked to a museum of sex.
So, for that matter, is the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees non-profit cultural institutions, and which refused to recognize the museum out of fear that its name would make a mockery of all museums. One anti-porn group, the Catholic League, attacked the museum for "celebrating reckless sex and moral pollution" and dismissed its historical aims as a sham. But the denunciations have had virtually no effect.
"We don't accept government or taxpayer funds, so we don't have to worry about (protests)," Gluck shrugs.
"In fact, we'll probably generate tax dollars for the city."
