Posts tagged New York City

These days, pornographers, pundits and scientists are forever pondering what women want, but in 1913, at least, it was pretty clear: They wanted “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic,” a film depicting the sexual coercion of innocents into a life of brothels, and they weren’t going to let a team of New York’s finest get in their way. When the deputy police commissioner of New York brought six officers to the Park Theater to seize the film, the 500 or so women waiting to see the 9:30 screening nearly broke into a riot, waving their green tickets and making a mad dash for the door. The scene attracted several thousand protesters who joined the cause in sympathy, a crowd that dispersed only when the police brought in reinforcements. Never was a film purporting, in its own words, to “teach a great moral lesson” so ardently embraced by a group of young women. (The producers’ argument: Learn from the mistakes of our protagonist to resist the seductive ways of that dark, handsome stranger.)

There’s a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses, in “The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City,” less a catalog of vice than an analysis of attempts to evade its suppression. Long promises at the outset that the book will demonstrate that “the agents for good and evil, in New York especially, are symbiotic.”

When it comes to illicit media, the agents for good and evil, even outside New York, are always symbiotic: pornography, in the experience of many moral crusaders, is like an infuriating weed that loves nothing more than a good pesticide, its strength only enhanced by efforts to tamp it down. But Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city. Try to eliminate drinking on Sunday by limiting it to hotels, as did the Raines Law of 1896, and suddenly every bar and saloon in Manhattan is putting up cheap dividers to create makeshift accommodations, ideal breeding grounds for prostitution, which thrived in the era of the so-called Raines Law hotels. Try to provide a place where working-class men can find a bathroom that isn’t in a bar, and from that solution — public restrooms — will come another challenge: gay (semipublic) sex. Close down the Continental Baths, a glorious, early-’70s gay pick-up spot, and make way for Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swinger’s club in the same location in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel.

via Book Review – Histories of Sex and Censorship in New York City – Review – NYTimes.com.