In 1979, a group called Women Against Pornography opened an office in what was then, in the organizers’ view, the belly of the beast: Times Square. WAP members, predominantly white feminists, who believed that porn had the power to reinforce, and even breed, misogyny, led others who shared their views on eye-opening tours of the neighborhood’s peep parlors, X-rated movie theatres, and live sex shows, hoping to turn out shocked shock troops for what was then a growing branch of the women’s movement. There were some ironies, not to say cruelties, to this mission. The great nineteen-eighties debates known as “the feminist sex wars” and a lot of writing by queer critics and memoirists would help reveal them. In “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” from 1999, the Black gay novelist Samuel R. Delany wrote elegiacally about how the seamy old Forty-second Street had fostered cross-class contact and welcomed sexual encounters that could have happened only in darkened theatres and similar spaces; he lamented its sanitized successor. Even in 1979, the Times was noting that the WAP office had taken over a location that was formerly “a soul food restaurant and gathering place for transvestites and prostitutes.”
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.