My larger dissertation looks at popular literature, art, guidebooks, music, advertisements, film, and the web, to demonstrate how New York City’s iconic sexual scenes and subcommunities have continuously been a part of the American popular imagination from the earliest gentleman’s directories published in the 19th century through to New York Magazine’s most recent annual sex issue. I contend that New York has continuously used sex as a tool to promote and market itself as a sexual frontier and a sanctuary for fringe culture, as a place both within America and yet set apart from it.
This presentation is a chapter from my dissertation and will specifically focus on New York’s role as sexual commodity in three of the city’s most influential publications. Founded in 1968, New York Magazine was one of the nation’s first urban lifestyle magazines. The publication featured New York sex on the cover several times, dedicating entire issues to tracing Gotham’s libido throughout its history. The Village Voice, started in 1955, was one of the nation’s first alternative weekly publications, covering topics that others shied away from and featuring adult content and recurring sex columns. Finally, TimeOut New York, which began in London in 1968 and published its first New York edition in 1995, has had popular segments devoted to love, dating, and sex in the city and still produces a popular annual sex issue. While each of the publications featured are New York-centric, they have also had national cultural significance. I argue that each has successfully sold a distinct image of New York sex to America that not only reflects the city’s current sexual climate and its ever-changing physical, cultural, and moral landscape, but also speaks to America’s attitudes towards sexual practices and helped to set national sexual trends.
About the presenterAndrea Lyn Glass
Andrea Glass received both a B.A. in American Studies and Art History from Penn State in 2002. She also holds an M.A. in American Studies from Penn State Harrisburg and an M.A. in American History and Museum Studies from the University of Delaware. Andrea is currently ABD in the American Studies doctoral program at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. Her interests include: American popular and consumer culture, urban studies, gender and sexuality, and space and place.