SEXIS WRONG

whips or wearing spiked collars were confiscated as degenerate.
Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple: an outrage. The Super
Bowl’s beer commercials featuring (as Frank Rich observes)
“a crotch‐biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty‐mouthed
child”: that’s entertainment. In the late 1990s, with the Giuliani
administration tearing down the Times Square porn
shops, a giant Calvin Klein poster towered over 42 nd Street
featured teenage rapper Marky Mark in form‐fitting Calvin
Klein jeans and little else. Rebecca Robinson of the Times
Square Business Improvement District had to wonder “how
far we’d actually come.” 7
That question could have been asked about the mayoral strategies
that led to the eradication of the Times Square porn
stores themselves. Over sixty-five years ago, in 1937, Mayor
LaGuardia earned himself quite another epithet than Little
Flower among New York’s young men by initiating the process,
completed in 1942, of closing down burlesque. As in
Giuliani’s time, it was not obscenity legislation but zoning that
stamped out the offending blight (42 nd Street was a dangerous
place to be by the mid-1980s, although not because of
the porn-strip-peep palaces, but due to Mob involvement in
drugs and prostitution, to which the porn stores were ancillary).
During the Depression, Times Square had lost its elite
theaters and speakeasies, and had become increasingly a
The remedy was a draconian
exercise in self-censorship, the
Comic Book Code.
cornucopia of mass entertainment, or honky tonk. As tabloid
editorials verbally strafed the Minsky-owned burlesque theaters
as “plague centers,” LaGuardia attacked especially the
Minsky chain as places of “incorporated filth,” and opined,
without supporting evidence, that the striptease had incited
the recent sex crimes that the New York dailies ballyhooed. 8
Mayors Wagner, Lindsay, Beame, and Koch, as well as Giuliani,
later similarly described the Mobbed-up, increasingly
sleazy sex carnival that Times Square was becoming. Garish,
erotically-focused signage, all-night sex emporia, streetwalkers,
pavements littered with flyers for peep shows and massage
parlors, shouted insults, and bottle gangs were part of
this late-twentieth-century vice center. But both LaGuardia
and Giuliani knew that First Amendment cases were hard to
win, especially with brilliant lawyers such as Morris Ernst in
the 1930s and Herald Price Fahringer in the 1990s declaring
that there were specific criteria separating the sexually explicit
from the legally obscene.
After winning the obscenity conviction of a single burlesque
show, LaGuardia’s License Commissioner resorted to his
power to refuse to renew the permits of any burlesque theater.
The Commissioner based his decision on two separate
observations, shared by area businessmen. He said that the
burlesque, from lobby card and marquee to runway and stage,
had encouraged rowdiness, was “completely sex-centered,”
and was “poisoning” the district’s social life. He also pointed
out—and this was why he used his licensing power—that
their youthful and working-class clientele, gaudy billboards,
and flannel-mouthed barkers had brought down property values
in the area. 9 It was the 42 nd Street Property Owners and
Merchants Association, complaining since 1919 of the decline
of respectable businesses on the street, that alerted the local
anti-vice organizations to the problem in the first place.
In the 1990s, after the Times Square Business Improvement
District (BID) interpreted a neighborhood survey as revealing
the negative “secondary effects” of the porn shops on other
businesses, similar zoning regulations went into effect. The
BID surveyed owners of “major chain” and “well known” restaurants,
apartment houses, and hotels; real estate brokers;
church and community groups; and public-school principals. 10
There was general agreement among those interviewed that
the sex businesses brought down property values, discounted
tourism, and increased crime. The sample used was criticized,
and statistics regarding these effects were disputed
as inconclusive. 11 Bottom line: The Disney organization demanded
that before they would invest in 42 nd
Street’s redevelopment, the Deuce’s sex businesses
had to go. 12 Property values and city
revenues certainly did soar with the clearing
of the redevelopment area and Disney’s purchase
of the New Amsterdam Theater.
In both cases, the losers were the hoi polloi. In the 1930s,
they filled the grinder movie houses, taxi dancehalls, shooting
galleries, juice stands, carny flea circuses, and cafeterias.
The gay population in the nearby residential hotels enjoyed
the same attractions and had its own hangouts, as well. 13 In
the 1970s and 1980s legions of underclass and middle-class
adolescent males and adults wanted the peep booths, porn
theaters where whatever kind of alternate sexuality was tolerated,
and non-sex outlets such as the delis, cut-rate drug,
electronic, and clothing stores, army-navy outlets, and novelty
shops. 14 Moreover, it is doubtful that owners of these latter
business really would object to neighboring sex emporia,
since they served many of their patrons. People who need
inexpensive goods and services, who in the 1930s could not
afford call girls, night clubs, or under-the-counter photos and
books, and who in 1995 could not afford Internet porn, phone
sex, or gentlemen’s clubs, needed to venture to the peep
booths and browse magazines, photo sets, and used videos.
The essential fact was and is that commercialized sex, partly
because it is widely affordable, is incompatible with the sta-
310 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG