The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Before pornography was a few clicks away on your computer, and then before you could slip a videotape of an X-rated movie into your VCR, you had to go out to see performed porn. You also had to go out to buy dirty magazines. Any American city big enough had places for such commerce, but there was no commercial sex scene more famous than that of our biggest city. It isn't surprising that the history of New York's sex-for-sale is lively and full of contradictions, and in _The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City_ (Ig Publishing), journalist and social historian Kat Long has chronicled the ups and downs of the city's sex trade. Because New York leads the nation in many ways, this is a history of sexual culture in the United States, with particular attention to what has gone down in New York and in particular within the famous Times Square region. Long shows that though the region has been cleaned up for a few years, there has been over a century of attempts to rid the city of vice. The different versions of the vice squad through the century have fought the battle in different ways, but there has been so much give and take between the sides that it makes sense, as Long shows, to look at the different forces as symbiotic. "As everyone knows, the city is being rebuilt," she quotes Police Chief William McAdoo as saying, "and vice moves ahead of business." He said this, however, over a hundred years ago, and it remains true.
Long starts with a name that will be familiar to anyone who knows something about the history of American pornography. Anthony Comstock was indignant that there should be any written material discussing or depicting sex or medical issues connected with sex. This put him at odds with a foe who would bother him for decades, Margaret Sanger, who campaigned for contraception, family planning, and the improvement of women's lot thereby. As time went on, therefore, Comstock became passé, but not before he gained the authority to censor all mail in the United States. He was so notorious and so eager to sling Biblical invective that even the YMCA, with which he partnered because it had so many of the same goals, eased him out. Comstock insisted that children's moral purity had to be preserved, the sort of argument that still gets trotted out to attempt to keep adults from seeing adult entertainment. Movies came to New York and were flourishing by 1910, including the "sex problem" films which decried (and yet exploited) white slavery. Long shows (in a book that often has this sort of pattern) that the sex-problem film was to return in the sixties, like _Bad Girls Go to Hell_, as shown in small theaters in Times Square. The exploitation pictures were surpassed by a new graphic visual eroticism, the peep show, which was invented by Martin Hodas in the 1960s, but peeps and their advertising were pulled from Times Square after a judicial decision against Ralph Ginzburg and his hardcover, unseedy journal _Eros_ in 1963. Al Goldstein fared far better with a much less classy publication starting in 1968, the tabloid _Screw_, which reviewed sex movies, and the serious attention it gave to them prompted their improvement. _Deep Throat_ premiered in New York in 1972. For those who wanted not to watch but to act, there were the baths, some of which were well maintained and upscale. The famous Continental Baths became Plato's Retreat in 1977, becoming a headquarters for group sex and thrill-seeking. The seventies, however, also saw the city getting tough with zoning legislation, a battle with sex shops that would last for decades. The moralists have been pleased with the outcome. In Long's summary of the battle, however, it seems that any moral crusade was simply an excuse for a land grab of some of the most valuable acres in the nation.
Long includes details and anecdotes about a wide variety of subjects, like the Pornography Commission of 1970 which embarrassed the Nixon administration by finding that porn really was not so bad for people, the subsequent 1986 commission which obediently found that porn was not at all good for people, the delightfully-named Golden Rule Pleasure Club which scandalized visitors in the nineteenth century, the ambiguous effects of the feminists of Women Against Pornography, the Victory Girls (V-Girls) who patriotically made New York friendly for servicemen of World War II, the return of morality in the burlesque of the 1950s, and much more. Right now, the sites of former erotic shops and shows have been taken over by Disneyfication, and people are enjoying their titillation more in private. If there is any lesson to this entertaining history, though, in the big city the warring forces of license and restraint will adapt themselves to each other and change again.


Click Here to see more reviews about: The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City



"Theres a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses...Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city."—New York Times Book Review
"[Kat] Long covers the great upheavals that have pushed the advantage in the sex wars one way or the other..."—Village Voice
"Long's The Forbidden Apple is a fast-paced and vivid overview documenting the conflicts between evangelical moralists and defenders of sexual expression, commercial and otherwise. Anyone interested in New York City or sex will have to pick this up."—Timothy Gilfoyle, author, City of Eros and A Pickpocket's Tale
"Long has provided a fascinating overview of sex in New York City since the Civil War. Everything you always wanted to know—and a lot you would never have suspected!"—Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row, Paradise Alley and Dreamland

The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City reveals the endless battle between outlaw sex and moral righteousness that has been fought on the streets of America's most licentious city.

Beginning with Gilded Age New York, where upper-class men of society routinely slummed with prostitutes and burlesque dancers—then wrote scathing condemnations of the "Lost Sisterhood" for the next day's papers—and ending with Rudolph Guiliani's crackdown on the city's sexual life, The Forbidden Apple details the major trends in New York's sexual history, including the Victorian-era battles over prostitution; the women's movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the hedonistic roaring twenties; the rise of Times Square as the city's sexual epicenter in the 1940s and 1950s; the birth of the gay rights movement in the 1960s; the decadence and pornography of the 1970s, and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

The first-ever comprehensive sexual history of New York City, The Forbidden Apple shows how many of this country's most important sexual trends got their start in New York, and also demonstrates how the repressive forces of morality and decency have waged war against the forces of sexual liberation and freedom throughout the city's history.

Click here for more information about The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City