New Museum Celebrates NYC as Sex Capital

Sept. 30, 2002 — -- Porno movies. Risqué comics and books. Tabloid-style sex scandals. Openly gay culture. Mae West.

You have New York to thank for all of them — and probably for your perceptions of sex — say officials of the Museum of Sex.

The brand-new museum, located at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan, is set to open Saturday with its inaugural exhibit, "NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America."

"It was called 'Sodom on the Hudson'; that was the name for New York City," says Daniel Gluck, the museum's director and founder. "The idea, 'Only in New York,' is not a recent term or cliché. It is a fairly old one. And that is because it seemed that almost anything was possible in New York — good and bad, vice and achievement."

Gluck openly aspires for the Museum of Sex to be considered among the top ranks of serious, world-class museums. Just as New York's Museum of Modern Art is known as MoMa, Gluck and colleagues refer to their institution as MoSex.

The museum's official mission "is to preserve and present the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality," and those connected to it boast the museum fills a niche as the only one of its type in America.

"This is a serious endeavor, in the sense that it wants to inform and educate as well as to entertain," says June M. Reinisch, a historian adviser to the museum and director emeritus of The Kinsey Institute, a beneficiary of the exhibit's proceeds.

"Sexuality is a very important part of individual human life and to culture," she adds. "To not understand it is to be handicapped in your understanding of human relations and culture."

And where else to depict the sexual aspects of America's culture besides New York? Museum officials say that as America's pre-eminent commercial, cultural and media hub since the early 1800s, New York, more than any other place, historically has pushed America's sexual envelope.