This dialectic between sex and money was a surprise discovery for Kat Long, author of the forthcoming history of sex called The Forbidden Apple. She couldn’t believe few had written about it. There are niche books aplenty about gay men in 1970s New York, but little about the competing forces of “good and evil,” as she calls it, a pendulum that has swung faithfully since New York’s Gilded Age, where Long begins her sordid tale.
“When the economy is bleak, sex culture becomes more visible on a street level,” says Long, a former editor at GO magazine and contributor to BUST and the late Playgirl. “I think people need escape. Simple needs still need fulfilling. And these don’t change. It’s human nature. The question is how the sex industry adapts to these times.”
It’s got some catching up to do. Just look around. Contemporary New York is faint shadow of its former smut-peddling self. The Great Depression was the height of leg shows, peep machines and burlesques. The economic crisis of the 1970s gave rise to the golden age of gay and straight porn in which movies actually had plots and were made on film.You had great star names, too. “‘Harry Reems’ is my favorite,” Long says.
Things are different now. After America’s most-trusted family brand took over Broadway, a wave of “new wholesomeness,” Long writes, came crashing in. The Paramount became a pro wrestling-themed restaurant.The X-rated Adonis was bought by Blockbuster. Gay cinemas Eros I and Venus were turned into Broadway-themed restaurants.And the movie theater where Deep Throat premiered in 1972 was transformed into an Asian eatery Ruby Foo’s.
It’s common knowledge that the 1990s were a low blow. And not the fun kind. Rudy Giuliani promise to clean up a city that few thought could be cleaned up proved popular at first, Long says, because New Yorkers were tired of the political impotence of the 1970s and ‘80s. One of the Mayor’s first moves was to enforce so-called quality of life laws prohibiting littering, panhandling, graffiti and even the squeegee men.
The campaign was based on the brokenwindow theory of crime: If a window is left unrepaired, soon all the windows in the building would be broken. Looking lawless, in other words, leads to being lawless. It seemed like a good idea. Eventually, though, some New Yorkers suspected Giuliani’s moral crusade masked something far more cynical.
A land grab, in effect.
“Morality was not the underlying reason for the quality of life campaign,” Long says. “It was used as justification for a real-estate snatch. The rhetoric was if you got rid of the garbage, the graffiti and the sex, you’d have better property values and your kids would be safer. Money talks in New York.There was always a clear economic subtext.”
The next step was applying broken-window theory to the sex industry, most of which was clustered around the highly coveted properties of Times Square. If broken windows lead to crime, God only knows what deviant behavior oozed from titty bars and beaver shows. Everyone knows high crime equals low property values. It seemed persuasive that getting rid of adult entertainment would be better for everyone. It was time to push sex out.
Hence, the so-called 60-40 Law, which defined an “adult establishment” as anything selling more than 40 percent adult merchandise. It “radically changed the sexual landscape of New York,” Long writes, because it forbade sex shops and adult businesses from being near schools, churches, residential areas and even near each other.
Sex moved out and wholesomeness moved in, sending property values soaring. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the : “Niketown, the Gap, Starbucks, Banana Republic and the Body Shop — these are now the wholesome storefronts that increasing set the city’s tone.” It was the end of an era.All the while no evidence arose to link sex and increased crime. Looking back, Long says, many New Yorkers are bitterly asking themselves, “What have we done?”
“I personally feel a sense of loss,” Long says. “Once you take these things away, you can’t get them back. There's outrage out there against this nanny state and against a feeling of the city being taken away from the people who live and work here.”
How about now? Is there a comeback amid the burst tech and real-estate bubbles? Will the sex industry return amid the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression? Perhaps, Long says. Sex isn’t going away. We don’t know right now how it will adapt, but history shows that it will in some form or another. It always has. “For sexual culture, change always comes during crisis,” Long says. “The push and pull is timeless. It’s times like these that usually see sex come roaring back.”
The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City
By Kat Long (Ig Publishing), 272 pages
