They Finally Gave it a Museum

The Museum of Sex is one of the least sexy places in New York City. The first libido-quashing aspect of the experience is the mass of homeless men asleep in the museum's doorway and the dingy scaffolding that wraps around the building, a former retail space and rumored to be an old brothel (is there a difference?). The second blow is the $17 ticket price, although they have a "special weekday rate" of $12 before noon Monday through Friday (a Columbia ID does not get you in for free at this museum, and you must be 18 or older for admission). There are the awkward headphones and audio sets they hand you to accompany your tour of the museum. Very unsexy. The covered windows and the sleazy striptease music piped from speakers in the ceiling lend the scene an aura of strip-club affectation that is much more of a façade than it is a titillation.   
But titillation is not the purpose of this museum. Once you have peeled the red X from your ticket and slapped it onto your shirt, you are a consensual participant in the mission of the Museum of Sex, which is to stimulate our biggest erogenous zone, the brain. The museum's mission is "to preserve and present the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality and to bring to the public the best in current scholarship." There is even a Board of Historian Advisors to lend legitimacy to this mission, including Columbia's own Elizabeth Blackmar, a professor in the history department.  
The museum's inaugural exhibit is "NYC SEX: How New York City Transformed Sex in America." Wandering through the exhibition, it is not altogether obvious exactly how this transformation occurred. It is also not altogether obvious how this museum occurred. The exhibit spaces are lined with cheap white plaster; there are grey smudges and footprints on the walls. The installations seem slapdash and somewhat underdeveloped, with awkward labeling systems that rely on the individual audio sets to fill in the blanks.  
The exhibit itself is divided into three galleries. The first, on the bottom floor, contains historical information and 19th-century artifacts. The second floor has two galleries which encompass turn-of-the-century, 20th-century, and contemporary aspects of New York sex.  
The first gallery is scattered with displays about 19th-century New York and some very unsexy stuff that occurred back then. Along a far wall in the lower gallery is a collection of 19th-century anatomical models, including a papier-mâché model of the male anatomy, a syphilitic face and skull, and a wax representation of a female pelvis with a hernia. A voice describing the imminent threat and atrocious effects of syphilis descends ominously from a speaker overhead. Also in this display case is one of my favorite pieces in the museum: a mummified penis. The label that accompanies it reads: "If this penis seems unusually large, it is because the specimen includes the muscle that extends and attaches to the pubic bone, acting as an anchor for the organ. The testes would have been roughly halfway along the shaft." This "specimen" by an "unidentified preparer" is shiny, black, shrivelled, and somewhat deformed, with collapsed veins visible along its shaft.  
Also in the first gallery is a case full of old prophylactics. There is an assortment of pessaries, a rusty-looking metal intrauterine device, and a collection of 19th-century condom tins with names like "Champ Prophylactics," "Nun Better," and "Tally-Ho," along with old standbys like Trojan and Ramses. There was a security guard posted in the doorway who, full of hope, informed me that there was "more upstairs!" as he pointed to the stairwell. The stairs to the second floor are apparently left over from the building's previous life. They look plain and shoddy, but the stairwell is actually one of the most exciting aspects of the museum. Speakers mounted on the plaster wall play clips from the Apology Line, a radio confessional hosted by Mr. Apology (Allan Bridges) between 1980 and 1995. I paused on the cement steps and listened to a man call in to say that he loves stealing panties from the laundry room. "I just love women's warm panties," he says. "I'm not sure what to do about it."  
The second floor is much raunchier than the first. There is a display of S&M photographs and fetish gear by Charles Guyette, the "G-string king," which includes handmade rubber hoods, leather restraints, and elaborate gags which are dated "pre-1967." There are photographs of group sex from the 1940s, a collection of lesbian pulp fiction, and a group of kitschy cheesecake paintings in which young women pose as pin-up girls against solid, primary-colored backgrounds. Complementing the cheesecake is a collection of beefcake--gay porn photographs of naked musclemen. There is a section devoted to Christine Jorgenson, a GI from the Bronx who went to Denmark a man and returned two years later a woman. Jorgenson was the first publicly-acknowledged American to have a sex change. The installation consists of video clips from 1953 and a shellacked collage of newspaper clippings about Jorgenson's transformation.  
In the third and final gallery, the Village People come pulsing out of the ceiling to accompany the survey of 70s and 80s pornography that occupies most of the gallery space. There are sections about Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame, Annie Sprinkle, and Vanessa del Rio, a porn star from the 70s and 80s known as the "Latin from Manhattan." Del Rio was one of the first minority women to make it big in the porn industry, and her commentary about this success is the most entertaining aspect of the little audio system that was handed to me with my ticket. There are television screens showing the work of these women placed awkwardly along the exhibit space. In this context, the films are surprisingly unstimulating and almost absurd.  
Past the pornography, there is information about the Disneyfication of Times Square, including Vanessa del Rio discussing Giuliani who, she argues, should have made a "red light district like they have in Amsterdam ... now Mickey is there." And at the very end of the last gallery, there are some requisite papers about AIDS activism and queer rights.  
The Museum of Sex likes to call itself MoSex, alluding to the abbreviation of MoMA, whose status this museum will never attain. A sloppy mixture of academics and art, the inaugural exhibit at the Museum of Sex is completely unremarkable. My biggest erogenous zone was left flaccid.  
I do, however, recommend the museum's web site, where you can browse an interactive map of Manhattan and view stories people have written about their raunchy sexual encounters all over the city. One of these stories takes place in the Butler stacks and another is set in a Barnard dorm. You can even post your own story. It's free, there are no cheap headphones, no bad music, and, while you're at it, you can stimulate your own erogenous zones.  

The Museum of Sex is on 27th Street at 5th Ave. Thanks to O.B. for assistance with this article.