Read our reviews of the year’s notable new fiction and nonfiction. Spotting it from the car, my mom would say, in mock confusion, “Now, who do you suppose is nude in there-is it the bowlers?” Driving through Hollywood, you’d often see marquees advertising “Live Nude Girls.” She’d say, “Much better than the alternative.” airport, on Century Boulevard, there was a sign for nude bowling. There were the no-tell motels with the blinking neon signs on Ventura Boulevard. There was the friendly neighborhood drag bar, the Queen Mary, down the street from the Sav-on drugstore where my friends and I got our school supplies. What I did know was that the world was lightly stitched with other people’s desires and with public settings to satisfy them in. On the other side of the country, I was finishing high school that year, in Los Angeles County’s suburban San Fernando Valley, a place that I had no idea was then becoming, and would remain for several decades, the center of porn production. 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.” 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. In “ Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” from 1999, the Black gay novelist Samuel R. 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. There were some ironies, not to say cruelties, to this mission. 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. 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.
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