United Press International - September 30, 2002
Frederick M. Winship

The Museum of Sex -- known to New Yorkers as MoSex -- is the dream-come-true of Daniel Gluck, a 34-year-old Computer Age success story who sold his software development company profitably in 1999 to devote full time to developing the museum with the help of a board of distinguished scientists, historians, authors, and artists. He patterned it after similar institutions in Europe but with a more serious purpose than most.

"The mission of the Museum of Sex is to preserve and present the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality, bringing to the public the best in current scholarship," the museum's manifesto states.

Gluck and a score of investors bought a late Victorian building at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street as a museum site, discovering in the course of renovation cubicles on the top floor that suggest the premises were used as a brothel as recently as a decade ago. The museum, which represents an investment of many millions of dollars, occupies the entire building with two floors given over to 5,000 square feet of exhibition space.

The opening show, "NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America," to run through July 3, proves that the Museum of Sex is not out to titillate the public -- although titillation will be part of the experience for some visitors -- but to educate it. It is open only to visitors 18 years old or older and the admission fee is a respectable $17, hardly a cheap thrill. No photography is allowed in the exhibition galleries.

"NYC Sex" is divided into six sections covering prostitution, abortion, birth control, burlesque entertainment, commercialized obscenity, fetishes, and censorship through exhibition of art, photographs, publications and a variety of artifacts from the museum's extensive collection and from private collections.

The displays are mounted in a maze of narrow corridors fitted with the latest interactive technology.

It's about as handsome as a museum with limited space can be, and the wall labels are exceptionally informative and easy to read. It seems a shame that the state of New York has refused the Museum of Sex accreditation as a not-for-profit institution on the grounds that it would "make a mockery of the word museum" and the Catholic League attacked it as a museum "run by pornographers" even before it opened to the public.

"We have decided not to appeal the state's decision but to go it on our own as a for-profit museum," Gluck, who serves as executive director, told United Press International.

"Profits will go toward maintenance and research and will be shared with several groups including AIDS Community Research Initiative of America and the Kinsey Institute."

Gluck said he expects the museum to attract 100,000 visitors a month. If it does, he added, it could become profitable in six months.

Grady Turner, the museum's executive curator and a former exhibits director at the New-York Historical Society, said the opening show "explores the sexual subcultures of the city and how they influenced the mainstream." It covers the years between 1825, when the completion of the Erie canal made New York City the commercial and financial capital of the nation, and the present day.

Details of the city's bawdy past, from the dens of iniquity on The Bowery in the mid-1800s to the porno palaces of Times Square, only recently put out of business by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, are fascinating, even if a display of abortion instruments like those used by Fifth Avenue's notorious Madame Restell more than a century ago seems to be taking illustration of a theme to the limits.

But it is the cast of characters that can really hold a visitor's attention. One quickly becomes acquainted with Helen Jewett, a young prostitute whose 1836 killing exposed the city's thriving sex industry in the public prints, anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. And then there is the marvel of her age, Victoria Woodhull, who preached free love and became the first woman to run for president of the United States in 1872.

Almost as colorful are Mae West, who was jailed for bringing sex to Broadway, pin-up picture king Irving Klaw, G-string tycoon Charles Guyette, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, photographers George Platt Lynes and Robert Mapplethorpe, artists Paul Cadmus and Reginald Marsh, pornography film star Linda Lovelace, sex change pioneer Christine Jorgensen, and sex guru Xaviera Hollander, who is still proudly known as The Happy Hooker.

Many of the exhibits are not for those who find explicit sexual materials embarrassing, although privacy is provided by computer booths offering "1001 Nights" and other film material. Those who blush easily may want to skip the "Tijuana Bibles," those pocket size cartoon books that taught generations of youths about sex, examples of sadomasochistic equipment, and the scores of homoerotic photographs of both men and women.

But on the whole, the Museum of Sex is serving a serious purpose, especially at the turn of the 21st century when almost any form or sex or sexual perversion is considered acceptable material for novels, plays, movies, and television and sex clubs in the style of "Plato's Retreat" still thrive.

Nor does it turn a blind eye to the consequences of public and orgiastic sex, devoting the final display, "Safe," to the era of AIDS and how it has changed the sexual scene forever.
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