Joe Bob’s America: MoSex for me

Joe Bob’s America: MoSex for me

NEW YORK, Oct. 25, 2002 -- The first thing I saw at the Museum of Sex was a solid white sculpture of a dead hooker crumpled up on her bed. Okay, obviously this is gonna get kinky.

It was the body of Helen Jewett, the most famous dead prostitute in New York history, dispatched in April 1836 by a young dandy named Richard P. Robinson who was attempting to retrieve his love letters so he could get married to a debutante. Things got ugly that night; he didn't just kill her, he set her on fire.

If there's an overall message to be gleaned from this first-of-its-kind temple of erotic history, it's that things often get messy when it comes to sex. Almost everyone featured in the whole 200-year survey of New York sex went to jail or got indicted or got skewered by the tabloid press. (This is not necessarily a bad thing. There's a whole section devoted to "bad girls" who converted their celebrity into careers on the stage.)

MoSex, as the museum is called, has had a messy beginning itself. The opening was delayed a week because they were still getting rid of exposed wires and cables, and needless to say there was no ceremonial ribbon-cutting by the mayor. In fact, the New York State Board of Regents turned it down for non-profit tax-shelter status, a procedure that's usually a cakewalk for a new museum, especially one with an academic tone.

The Catholic League has already protested its very existence. This Fifth Avenue museum is being greeted by authorities as only one tier up from an Eighth Avenue peep show.

Excuse me, lost my train of thought for a moment -- Xaviera Hollander is making strange sounds on my personal narrated audio-guide gizmo. I'm in the 19th century brothel section, and feeling a little peppier now that the hookers seem warm-blooded and hospitable. In fact, there's an interactive whorehouse map: press the button on a New York City grid, and the brothel at that location will be identified and described, thanks to a popular businessman's brochure that lovingly details the charms of each madam and the relative beauty of her stable.

Unfortunately, Anthony Comstock is just around the corner. Comstock, moral crusader and author of the famous Comstock Act of 1873, was a damn good writer, though, and so his outraged "disorderly tenement house reports" give precise descriptions of EXACTLY what the girls were doing in the parlor and bedroom. And all this time I thought VanessaDel Rio invented that stuff.

Did I mention the "filthy penises"? That's how Comstock described the displays at the notorious "anatomy museums" on the Bowery, where Victorian men went to see body parts they would never otherwise be allowed to see. And sure enough, larger than life, a human penis, preserved in some sort of metal alloy, is featured in a MoSex display case, not far from the sculpture of a skull with its face eaten away by tertiary syphilis. Lest you be frightened by the giant twisted member, the audio guide explains that it was taken from the body in such a way that preserved the internal AND external parts, and so it looks twice as large as it looked in real life.

Whew! Makes you wonder what spectacle could have been achieved by preserving John Holmes. But let's move on.

The white-slavery section is mostly a display of cautionary novels about why girls should avoid dance halls. The Eugen Sandow display is a tribute to Flo Ziegfeld's "perfect human specimen," a ripped beefcake muscle-poser who performed in the nude around the turn of the century and, fortunately for posterity, made a Kinetoscope for Edison. Sandow's career declined after it was discovered that he was living with the composer and pianist Martinus Sieveling, neglecting his wife and children, which made those deltoids less appealing to the ladies.

Alas, I understand their disillusionment. I was appalled to learn from MoSex that "Little Egypt" was a generic belly-dancing sobriquet that was used at carnivals for more than 50 years by various faux-Egyptian hootchy-koo girls. (As an aside, ALL the burlesque girls up to a certain point in history tended to have thick trunks and round kewpie-doll faces. There's some lesson in male sexuality there, but I'm not exactly sure what it is.)

Much more appealing was Frances Bell Heenan, better known as "Peaches," who was married at 15 to Edward Browning, better known as "Daddy," then ran away from him a year later because she said he was a pervert (perversion, to a 15-year-old girl, being a relative thing). The great thing about Daddy and Peaches is that they were both exhibitionists. Peaches went on to a stage career. Daddy became the subject of endless lampoons in the tabloid press. The Daily Graphic even ran a series of "composographs" -- their word for doctored photos -- showing scenes in the bizarre bedroom of Daddy and Peaches, scenes which frequently involved Daddy's pet goose, which Peaches hated.

But here's the big difference between the tabloids then and now. Daddy was so enamored of the publicity that he started writing columns for the Graphic himself, giving even more details about the now legendary marital year with Peaches. Gary Condit, take note -- we can learn from our heritage.

But for me the highlight of the museum is the period from about 1907, when Flo Ziegfeld founded the Ziegfeld Follies, through the early 1950s, when the last of the great burlesque strippers started to retire. If you've only seen these women in grainy news photos, where they tend to look like worn-out cellulite-laden matrons, this exhibit will restore your faith in the taste of American men.

The modern stripper appears to have emerged from two 19th century traditions -- the "concert saloons" that were popular on the Bowery, which weren't that different from the saloons of the Wild West, with prostitutes doing erotic dances to attract customers; and the vaudeville circuit, especially the Keith circuit, where producers discovered that female contortionists were a gold mine. Nudity was out of the question in the early days of vaudeville, but a woman who did acrobatics while clad only in a body stocking would pack the house -- and the performers weren't above selling nude photos under the counter. (Check out the "Three Little Maids," who were virginal on the vaudeville stage but naked on the photo cards they sold.)

The museum has some astoundingly well-preserved photographs and film footage of Sally Rand, the ballerina-turned-stripper whose fan dance at the 1937 World's Fair led to a career with the Minsky brothers. If you've only seen her toward the end of her career, you'll finally GET IT. (Oddly enough, some of these women performed into their 60s, and even 70s) Gypsy Rose Lee pales in comparison -- overly broad hips and not that comely -- but the real revelation is Blaze Starr.

Blaze Starr's whole career was spent on burlesque stages in New Orleans and Baltimore. She only made one movie, Doris Wishman's "Blaze Starr Goes Nudist." But somebody captured on film one of her most famous acts, in which she strips in her boudoir, writhes around on the bed, and then gets so excited that the bed burns up. She's got the body, the attitude, the natural movement, and the sensuality of a born stripper, and even though the film footage of Tempest Storm in the 1940s indicates Tempest was the most beautiful of them all, her dancing is wooden and lifeless in comparison. (She does that sort of "skate" move, jerking her shoulders forward as she lurches around the stage.)

Also featured in this part of the exhibit is the busty Jennie Lee in "Red Hot Mama," with audio narration by Dixie Evans, who gives a pretty hilarious description of her entire act.

Unfortunately, the remainder of MoSex never again rises to this level of artistry, perhaps because sexual performance itself became less interesting as it became more explicit. (Annie Sprinkle? Just go ahead and shoot me.)

There's still lots of fascinating memorabilia, though. There's a whole case of decorative Jazz Age condom tins. (Whatever happened to the condom tin anyway? It makes sense. It protects the condom!) There's a great collection of dirty pictures -- the kind that were sold by leering men at the carnival. And it's intriguing to me that all the women who crusaded for sexual causes like birth control (Margaret Sanger, author of "What Every Girl Should Know"), "free love" (Victoria Woodhull) and safe abortion (Madame Restell, abortionist to the rich and famous) were LOOKERS. And the pugnacious anti-sex crusaders were invariably hideous.

Gay sex starts to turn up around the 1880s, in the form of the "fairy," a term invented for the effeminate dandy of the time. We've got the famous Ariston bath house raids of 1903, the "pansy craze" of the 1920s and 1930s, and, interestingly, a male-impersonator craze beginning around the turn of the century, with celebrated women who spent their entire lives performing and dressing as men, mostly in Greenwich Village, where a lesbian bar called the Howdy Club took a classic photograph of its football team, in uniform, in the 1940s.

There are explicit comic books from the 1930s, using the likenesses of movie stars performing unspeakable sex acts.

We have Mae West, of course, who started her self-publicizing career when she starred in "Sex" on Broadway in 1926, didn't really become a star until the age of 40, and actually looks sexier in the pictures taken in her 40s and 50s. (In her early 20s she looks plain.)

MoSex is housed in what I hope is a temporary building, with narrow hallways leading to three isolated warrens where they've done their best to pack in as many displays as possible, and this creates a kind of cozy familiarity with your fellow museum-goers. Not too surprising, then, when you hit the second floor and nobody makes eye contact -- because four really raunchy stag films are being projected onto the wall. Yes, it's hard-core, and yes, people watch these vintage creations by "Unidentified Director" with a sort of vague unease, hoping no one will notice which part they're enjoying.

It's the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, during which sex becomes a) increasingly public, b) increasingly homosexual (judging by the percentage of gay displays), and c) increasingly preoccupied with the nitty-gritty of technique. Yet there are occasional works of art among the homoerotic sketches, gay hustler photos (Thomas Painter, a bookstore clerk, photographed every man he had sex with over a 30-year period), the Christine Jorgensen display, the porno muscle magazines, the fetish photography, the peep shows, the leather bars, and the live sex acts at Times Square theaters.

For example, I thought the lesbian pulp fiction was a hoot. The cheesecake drawings published in the magazines of Robert Harrison, featuring lots of stiletto heels and perfectly coiffed beauties in come-hither poses, are fascinating. (Unfortunately, at this point the audio guide lapses into that giddy-schoolgirl PBS "All Things Considered" patter: "Wink! Titter! Eyeful! Whisper. Flirt! Publisher Robert Harrison's men's magazines promised gossip, advice . . ." Fortunately the machine has a "stop" button.)

And then, of course, there's Betty Page. When Irving Klaw started photographing her in the late 1940s, doing the first mass-market mail-order bondage photos, he set a standard that's never been equaled. She was the first, and everything after her seems pallid and/or raunchy. She was one of those few icons who could seem innocent, playful and hot all at the same time.

Everything is downhill from there. There are occasional camp curiosities that made me laugh -- Xaviera Hollander's album "Happily Hooked" (1984), posters of the Village People, photos from Wigstock. But the sex clubs of the 1980s were just downright creepy, the gay bathhouses were tragic in light of the AIDS epidemic, and thank God the porno video makers all moved to Los Angeles. They wouldn't have understood Blaze Starr in the first place. In fact, the pornographers of today are more like those guys in the Bowery who ran the anatomy museums. You can only look at so many male members before you start longing for a good body-stocking contortionist act.

Since MoSex is arranged in chronological order, it's kind of like going to an orgiastic party that, on the third day, turns nasty. After MoSex, you don't want no mo sex.

I strolled out onto Fifth Avenue -- and had a cigarette.