Introduction: Fred Methner’s Street

Abstract

Abstract Beginning in the mid-1960s, the spectacle of sexuality appeared on the streets and in the public places of large cities throughout the United States in ways that had been unimaginable at any other moment in the nation’s history. The increasingly public nature of sexuality—a critical dimension of a larger moment in history that we call the sexual revolution—was rapturous for sexual revolutionaries. It was empowering for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who could finally express their affection, though never truly free from fear; it was liberating for unmarried women and men who “shacked up” before marriage, often to the wagging consternation of their older neighbors. It was ecstatic for the young men who crowded around—and even occasionally paid to enter—the thousands of strip clubs, sex shops, and massage parlors that dotted the urban landscape like a neon constellation. And it was profitable for the small armies of female and male prostitutes who swarmed from the hinterlands to the nation’s big cities, recognizing that sexual freedom need not be free. Sharing their profits in the highly sexualized metropolis were legions of pornographers, whose wares, once relegated to the back rooms of only the seediest skid row stores before the sexual revolution, were now displayed prominently in storefront windows throughout the cities, and even in the suburbs. For so many, the sexual revolution was an extended engagement with, and celebration of, the human libido.