Review: Terry Williams, The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City
Reviewed by Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Public sex in New York evolved amidst wide-ranging social and economic change in Gotham from 1979 to 2018. The “Disneyfication” of Times Square and the elimination of the most visible forms of public pornography attracted the most attention and commentary. But an evolving sexual revolution of sorts simultaneously occurred throughout the city. Topless and bottomless bars, sadomasochism and bondage clubs, lesbian and gay spaces, escort services, orgies, and swinger events proliferated at the turn of the millennium. New transgressive sexual subcultures emerged — fluid, elastic, and negotiable. For four decades, the sociologist and ethnographer Terry Williams was watching closely, taking notes. Literally.
The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City
By Terry Williams
Columbia University Press, 2022
312 pages
In The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City, Williams presents a “collage ethnography” of participant observations, an urban anthropology across time and space. While Williams divides his coverage of what he calls the “soft city” into three periods — 1979 to 1989, 1995 to 1997, and 2000 to 2018 — he deliberately avoids a systematic account or analytic narrative. The soft city of Terry Williams is informal, impressionistic, exploratory, transgressive.
The Zoning Ordinance of 1995 provides a historical pivot, a key moment of transformation for the practices and structure of public sex in New York. The ordinance prohibited any sexual establishment within 500 feet of a school, church, park, day-care center, or even another sex-related enterprise. Combined with the Giuliani mayoralty’s increased enforcement after 1998 of the 60-40 rule — no more than forty percent of the material in sex shop could be sex related — public sex assumed a new outward appearance in New York. This was most evident in the Times Square area, where “Disneyfication ended the agglomeration of sex shops and venues located right next door to one another.”
But Williams allows readers to see beyond the caricature of a once-grimy Gotham wiped clean for impressionable tourists, and its sometime corollary in public discourse, the battle between nostalgia for a grittier metropolis and fear of its return. His conception of the “soft city” — drawing upon Jonathan Raban’s and David Harvey’s accounts of the postmodern city — makes the Disneyfication and sexual sanitation of Times Square’s appear less of a historical Rubicon.
For Raban and Harvey, cities are complicated, resistant to human-imposed order, and defined by chaos, fragmentation, and indeterminacy. The desire for order is fraught with failure. As socially-fluid places, public-gathering locations in cities — entertainment venues, emporiums, stores, sporting events, theaters — functioned as confusing sites of performance. They were spaces that historically enabled residents and visitors alike to shed old behaviors, adopt new identities, assume multiple roles, become whatever they pleased. Personal identities were open, endlessly fluid, and thus rendered “soft.”[1]
In attending specifically to New York’s sexual realms, Williams’s conception of the soft city is more specific than Raban’s or Harvey’s, but shares a similar resistance to order. The soft city for Williams is a category intended to encompass a wide array of alternative and disparate public expressions of sexual identity and sexual behavior. He concentrates on those subjects “who openly and freely experiment with their sexuality and with where and how they do so.” His focus is neither the “sexual professional” nor those coerced into “terrifying lives of sexual and economic servitude.” Rather, Williams concentrates on the many and varied venues of mostly public sexual expression which invite voyeurs, strangers, visitors, residents, and others to experiment or adopt new and different forms of sexual identity and behavior. Williams juxtaposes this soft city to the “hard city” “of violence and crime,” or that organized around urban planning, development, work, and responsibility. He envisions the soft city as “a process of imagining,” at other times “an intellectual fantasy,” usually happening during the nighttime hours.
Williams adopts an unconventional methodology. Instead of providing a single-author chronological narrative, he incorporates both his field notes and those of colleagues and students who have worked with him during his four decades of research. The multiplicity of participant-observers (across gender, race, and age) enables Williams to present a diversity of spaces over time: topless and bottomless strip bars, the transgender Gilded Grape Barnum Room, and peep shows of Times Square in the 1980s, the heterosexual sadomasochism (S&M) and bondage clubs in the Gansevoort meat market district of the 1990s, more recent escort services which emerged in the 1980s as prostitution moved to more indoor locations (along with massage and tattoo parlors and tanning salons), and in the decades after 2000, foot-fetish S&M clubs, sex stores which cater to bondage clients, the Till Eulenspiegel Society where members engage in vaginal and anal fisting performances, the Hellfire S&M club which provides a “a refuge for the unsexy,” orgy and swinger events, and a variety of lesbian and gay spaces.
All of this is captured in vivid detail. Williams admits The Soft City is more of a “personal narrative,” one that frequently has more “reportage” and less of “a systematic treatise.” The Soft City, according to Williams, is a “collage of participant observations, executed by all sorts of people at many different times.”
Nevertheless, several themes stand out that make The Soft City required reading for students of New York City history, as well as the history of sexuality. First, historians will note the ongoing geographic fluidity of sexual behaviors associated with the soft city. Just as the most organized forms of prostitution and other varieties of commercial sex moved locations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, so too did public sexual practices in the four decades between 1980 and 2020.
Second, the field notes of Williams and his student reveal the prominence of urban ceremonials and rituals in the wide array of sex practices under examination. In each of these varied settings, those who practice certain rites and customs depart from and challenge “mainstream” sexual behavior. Spaces that sanction heterosexual swinging, fetish S&M, commercial sex work, or gay and lesbian activity, each have their specific rules of order. All have codes of behavior. To the uninitiated, conservative, or evangelical, these behaviors represent the degraded, deplorable, or deviant. But Williams demonstrates, often in the language of his subjects, that sex club members, fetish partiers, commercial sex clients, burlesque performers, S&M participants, swingers, and others in these disparate, distinct, and different spaces represent people “coming together to bond for a night with strangers, to engage in fun, frivolity, sex, and other types of adventures.”
Third, the soft city is a world turned upside down. S&M clubs, for example, thrive because they invert traditional sexual behavior. Here public and private behavior converge. Masturbating in public is criminalized in most places, but such behavior is never punished in these spaces. Walking around naked in public is illegal, but expected in such clubs. Aggressive spanking is not considered assault, but rather a spectator sport enhanced by mirrors which multiply and magnify the male and other gazes. S&M practices upend and confuse the meaning of pain and pleasure. In each of the sexual sectors explored by Williams, sexual pleasure becomes a collective event or expression.
During the past three decades, New York City public officials have done much to remove overt and visible sexual display from the streets and storefronts of the metropolis. But by Williams’s account, such state regulation has done little to discourage alternative sexual behavior. Indeed, the variety of alternative sexual practices and behaviors documented by Williams may have even expanded and now remain hidden in plain sight.
Soft City is often a book about the adaptations of recent history, but the world of public sex in New York sometimes echoes past sexual landscapes. One such resonance between the soft city described by Terry Williams and that of a century earlier can be found in lower Manhattan. In the Gene Frankel Theater at 24 Bond Street, members of the Till Eulenspiegel Society, many dressed in formal suits and evening gowns, observe and engage in sadomasochism performances that Williams likens to a poetry reading. The fluidity between the ordinary and the extraordinary is never more evident. But this is hardly new to this city block. A little more than a century earlier, a thriving, successful brothel operated a few houses east at 47 Bond Street. Here too the ordinary overlapped with the extraordinary. The owner was P.T. Barnum.[2]
Timothy J. Gilfoyle is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. His books include City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (W.W. Norton, 1992), A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (W.W. Norton, 2006), and, with Patricia Cline Cohen and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Men’s Weeklies in the 1840s (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[1] Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Hamilton, 1972); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), v, 5-6.
[2] Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Barnum’s Brothel: P.T.’s ‘Last Great Humbug,’” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18 (Sept. 2009), 586-613.