Manhattan sends sex to the museum

Decades after New York introduced America to sadomasochism, legal condoms, gay liberation and the modern pornography industry, sex returns to midtown Manhattan tomorrow.

But this time it comes with an inescapable aura of scholarly earnestness, a decidedly unseedy souvenir shop, and numerous panels of informative and educational text.

The country's first sex museum, which opens to the public on Saturday in an area of New York once renowned for its brothels and licentious saloons, is being touted as "the Smithsonian of Sex".

The name has caused some to interpret it not so much as a new chapter in the city's libidinous history as an indication that history is now, emphatically, history.

"The fact that there wasn't a sex museum seemed almost as big an absence to me as if there hadn't been a Museum of Modern Art," said Dan Gluck, the founder of the museum, which has already acquired a stylish acronym - MoSex - as is required of all such institutions in Manhattan.

The idea came to the 34-year-old former software entrepreneur, he said, in "a casual conversation that turned serious.

"I mean, it's not like as a child all I ever wanted to do was open a sex museum."

Five years later MoSex opens with a historical exhibit called NYCSex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America.

Visitors - over-18s only - are led through galleries bathed in pink light portraying everything from America's earliest legal condoms (made from sausage casings), past Mae West and early 20th-century gay lesbian pornography to puritanical crusaders against obscenity and the sexual revolution, before abruptly turning to a sombre exhibit on Aids.

It finishes with a computer installation where visitors can record their sexual experiences and fantasies - and read those of others, although presumably somebody is going to have to go first.

Despite the prominence of the words "Flesh", "Vice" and "Lust" in vast letters throughout the galleries, most of the exhibits consist of textual panels and small photographic displays, with only occasional moving pictures - a looped screening, for example, of an early-20th century "stag film", portraying "a threesome made possible by the new convenience of an automobile".

Even so, after a long struggle, the museum was denied non-profit status, compelling it to raise money privately, Mr Gluck said - no easy task until he convinced investors of the serious nature of the enterprise.

"I think this really can be done," said June Reinisch, a trustee of the museum and director of the Kinsey Institute, which has lent the new establishment substantial quantities of its photography archive.

"I think you can mount - that's probably the wrong word - I think you can establish an exhibition that brings the best academic knowledge we have to bear on the subject while preserving the exuberance.

"People should feel the exuberance - there should be several blushes for every visitor, or they'll be disappointed. We want people to have been intellectually stimulated... and to leave having been stretched.

Or maybe I should say extended. No, that's not a good word, either."

The Museum staff seemed vaguely disappointed at the relative lack of outrage which has greeted their debut. The condemnation has been almost entirely confined to William Donahue, director of the Catholic League, who says the museum should be called MoSmut.

But Grady Turner, its curator, said smut was only a small part of its focus.

"To be honest, I'm as interested in the couches as the bodies," he said, recalling weeks spent scrutinising the Kinsey and other archives to date the exhibits accurately.