The big closer act at the Pussycat Lounge was the lesbian go-go clowns, complete with flashing noses, Bozo hair and black high-top tennis shoes, ripping each other's clothes off and having simulated sex to the strains of "Love to Love Ya, Baby"-- but to tell you the truth, by that time I was pretty much maxed out on tattoo-drenched crotch-flashing performance art with a self-referential retro-burlesque post-modern attitude.

What's happening to me? I'm talking like . . . them! This is what happens when you spend too much time in the East Village, home of intellectualized spanking and arteests in bondage gear. Sometimes you can get nostalgic for "Live Sex Act!," from the antediluvian days of 42nd Street, when the grappling was real and, more to the point, had no camp subtext.

Ironically, I saw the go-go clown act the same week that the Los Angeles City Council, in a strange paroxysm of Victorian Comstockery, banned lapdancing. Yet a lapdance in New York is now considered so plain-vanilla and passé--movie stars, after all, publicize their lapdances on Page Six--that a similar ordinance here would probably meet with yawning indifference. Lapdances are for tourists.

The buzz on the street is that sleaze is back. But there's sleaze and then there's sleaze. Sure, the porn-store lawyers have beaten back Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to further Balkanize the sex trade, so that premier addresses are opening up in Soho (where a Toys in Babeland store will appear) and Chelsea (new home of Scores West). Yes, the number of topless bars has gone up instead of down for the first year since Giuliani declared war on G-strings. And that doesn't even count the strip clubs in the outer boroughs and New Jersey, where there are always rumors of wiseguy involvement, if not outright white slavery.

But the real Manhattan sleaze--the kind that always exists on the blurry edges of the law, beyond the control of any neo-Giuliani who might come along--is a floating crap game that thrives in lofts, in industrial spaces, in cafes, in midtown hotel ballrooms, and in locations so secret that they're announced on the Internet just an hour before the gathering takes place. (Next expected trend: the current European craze for "dogging," in which public park locations are announced on the Internet so that small crowds can gather to watch two people have sex al fresco. If the cops show, "We were just walking the dog.")

In other words, what Giuliani spawned is a new sexual underground for which the law has no terminology. And one of the rules for what I'll call Proto-Sleaze is that the venue itself must seethe with disrepute. At the Pussycat, which proudly advertises itself as located "in the depths of downtown," there's the kind of seedy noir ambiance that prevailed five years ago in the Meatpacking District, only to give way to gentrification and celebrity chefs, or in the Times Square of, say, 1985.

Except for not being located in the East Village, the Pussycat is a more or less typical sleaze haven. The street outside is permanently ripped up by various Ground Zero excavations. The first floor is a strip club frozen in the sixties, the kind of dank grotto where girls in half shadows gyrate on the bar itself and hustle drinks from men who often look like they're homeless. This makes it prime picturesque real estate for the rental spaces upstairs, always brimming with fetish parties, swingers gatherings, and, on the night I was there, the only sex show performed by actual carnival sideshow workers. ("Luckystiff," it's called, to distinguish it from the performers' day jobs, working the freak show at Coney Island under the name Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. The gravelly-voiced emcee, who wears jodhpurs, a derby and a gambler's vest, tells painful sex jokes while looking like a cross between Gallagher and Eric von Stroheim. "That was Insane Clown Pussy!" he croaks as the two dexterous lesbians, stark naked, bustle around the stage picking up their props and microscopic wardrobes.) Oddly enough, bare beavers are verboten in the downstairs strip club, but they're almost de rigueur at the upstairs shows--you know, "redeeming social value" and all that.

In New York in late 2003, there's a Thomas Mann feel to the studied decadence. It's not so much that the Giuliani crackdown has been rolled back--the garish porn storefronts are still illegal--as that sleaze has been broken down into its various specialized components (She-male Keg Party! Fetish Ball! Grrrrl Rave!) and tucked away in nooks and crannies where only the cognoscenti can find it.

At most of these gatherings it's not even about sex itself so much as costumes, posing and body modification--sex as performance art, sex as performance-enhancement art, and even sex as performance-anxiety art. At the Porno Jim Show, hosted by Jim Graham at Rififi Lounge every Saturday, actual porno films are projected, then deconstructed in the manner of a film professor at the New School, as Graham's tittering assistant Carin pretends to wax orgasmic and strip off her clothing in homage to the often bizarre images. The show is titillating, sardonic and horrifying all at the same time. Watching a 13-inch penis being consumed by three girls is something that, in a group dynamic, plays like a highway traffic safety film (unless you're careful, this could be you!), and as for the lens-spattering female-ejaculation montage- -well, let's not even go there.

In other words, there's a whole lotta spanking, flashing and crotch-grabbing going on out there, but increasingly it has less to do with titillating the customer--the traditional role of "gentlemen's clubs," peep shows and swingers parties--as it has to do with glorifying the performer. Exhibitionism is in, hookers are out, and it's all shrouded in an unwritten manifesto: "I'm one sick bizarro freak, isn't it cool?" (The chunky go-go girl in leather boots is a staple of all scenes, as though to say, "She's free! She's fat and she's free! She's doing this for her, not you, asshole!")

Even New York porn is different. (Yes, there's such a thing as New York porn. Even though 97 percent of all porn comes from the San Fernando Valley, we need our own.) The auteur of the moment is Venezuelan-born Maria Beatty, a lesbian and "professional submissive" who writes, directs and stars (sometimes while wearing a ball gag in her mouth) in films like "The Black Glove," "The Elegant Spanking" and "Tight Security," featuring black-and-white noir photography, silent-movie title cards ("Every stroke sends me into a raging storm of desire!") and every imaginable fetish, from hot wax torture to golden showers. (She's especially famous for the scene in which "Mistress Morganna" runs a silver spur across her nipples.) But like an NYU film student whose class project is a slasher film, she insists that there's a deeply meaningful subtext. "I believe," she told one interviewer, "[that] submissive fantasies, sexual freedom and the right to set one's own limitations are crucial to a dialectic process of identity building in SM which applies both to men and women."

Well, ooooooookay, it looked like a lot of kinky muff-diving to me.

Beatty learned her craft at the now world famous Pandora's Box, a Chelsea dungeon that opened in 1996 but expanded to 6,000 square feet for the new millennium and features seven "specialized playrooms" (The Torture Room, The Medical Chamber, The School Room, etc.), with a resident roster of dominatrices that are matched with customers by a "fantasy consultant." In other words, it's the suburban shopping mall version of BDSM, relegating to the past the days when you had to slink down urine- soaked passageways in a slum neighborhood and whisper your naughty desires to a  cadaverous figure in a Latex bodysuit.

In fact, if there's an overriding theme to the Sleaze Renaissance, it's that every kink, fetish, sordid desire and secret fantasy has been homogenized and packaged so as to be acceptable to the middle class. Unlike Plato's Retreat, the famous eighties sex club where you might have to brush up against a naked Al Goldstein, the clubs, dungeons and parties of today involve screening processes (to eliminate the Creep Factor), high cover charges (up to $300), secret locations, and strict music policies so that, while you're getting naked and trading partners, you won't lose your concentration because of a clueless deejay's fondness for primitive techno.

At the annual Royal Amusements, a spectacle featuring costumes reminiscent of the court of Louis XVI, a fashion show-- noir leather, extras in "Hello Dolly" bustles, women chained in aquaria, girls in gas masks and hot pants constructed of black masking tape, chartreuse Latex spacewomen, and a sort of naughty French aristocrat style that might be called Marquis de Louise Brooks--precedes the "private play activity." It's one of dozens of annual parties that become more elaborate with each passing year. An outfit called Executive Elite even offers the X-rated version of the Circle Line cruise, with three "extremely private and personal" hours aboard a luxury yacht jampacked with lapdancing masseuse strippers and an open bar. (They guarantee four girls for every five guys, a ratio that seems to have made some concession to the economic concerns of the performers.)

And, of course, as sleaze goes mainstream, it tends to get watered down for the benefit of Katie Couric and her media ilk, in the form of gimmicks like "Slavercise" (Mistress Victoria whips your bottom while you work out), "Naked Yoga," and "Go-Go Robics" with the Pontani Sisters (the Pontani Sisters being yet another retro-burlesque act)--the kind of quirky sound-byte news items that will cover the topic without getting into the nitty-gritty of just how bourgeois BDSM has become. (Sign of the times: a recent "alternative lifestyle" ad reads, "Live-in slave wanted. Slave must be financially secure.")

In the "alternative" media, on the other hand, the perverse becomes almost boringly commonplace. Even as Screw magazine flirts with disaster (missing issues, missing payrolls), the Village Voice and New York Press grow fat with hooker ads and personals so convolutedly sexual that they've had to invent new categories. (After Men/Women, Women/Men, Men/Men, Women/Women, Threesomes, Slaves, Multiples and the rest, the Voice resorts to the category "Anything Goes," while the Press settles for "Whatever's Clever.") To make your sexuality beyond categorization seems sort of the point, as does the fondness for atypical body types on the fetish stages of the city.

This is not to say there aren't plenty of places left for the drooling businessman trolling for pinup fantasies. The effect of the late-nineties Giuliani laws restricting topless locations has been to eliminate competition and make the existing strip clubs bigger and raunchier, with virtual armies of girls working for tips. And the escort service trade doesn't seem to have suffered, either, even though the demand for she-males seems to have skyrocketed, judging by the sheer number of pre-op trannies working the market.

But the best indication that sexual entertainment has entered an era of jaded acceptance again--jaded acceptance being the operative mode for much of New York's history--is the opening a year ago of the Museum of Sex (MOSEX) on Fifth Avenue. It's not so much that this first-of-its-kind temple of erotic history exists as that it exists with so little fanfare. Except for a token protest by the Catholic League, there was no controversy surrounding a permanent institution that celebrates 19th-century whorehouses (press the button to find your favorite brothel on the Manhattan grid), offers narrated audio tapes with Xaviera Hollander making orgasm sounds, displays of penises preserved in metal alloys (from the notorious "anatomy museums" of the Bowery), preserves the performances of famous strippers (including Blaze Starr's burning-bed act), showcases decorative Jazz Age condom tins (whatever happened to the condom tin anyway?--it makes sense--it protects the condom!), and turns the detritus and refuse from our guilty-secret past into high-camp artifacts. (Besides the usual array of dirty carnival photos, MOSEX has explicit underground comic books from the thirties, using the likenesses of movie stars performing unspeakable sex acts. The funniest one is called "Cary Grant, Male War Bride," although there's something to be said for the parody of "Flying Down to Rio" entitled "Ginger Rogers in A Flying Fuck.")

On the second floor of MOSEX, there are four really raunchy stag films projected onto the wall, as well as the gay hustler photos of Thomas Painter (a bookstore clerk who photographed every man he had sex with over a 30-year period), a Christine Jorgensen display, porno muscle magazines, the fetish photography of Irving Klaw (who immortalized Betty Page), lesbian pulp fiction ("Warped Women!" "Trap of Lesbos!" "21 Gay Street!") and histories of the peep shows, the leather bars, the bath houses, and the aforementioned live sex acts at Times Square theaters. The tone of the museum is ironic and safe, the sort of place you can go with a date--but don't expect it to sex you up.

Unfortunately, MOSEX history ends just a tad early, so it doesn't really cover the convergence of carnivals, retro pop culture and performance art that results in shows like Luckystiff at the Pussycat, where the lovely Angelica bends over to have darts thrown into her butt, then returns to shoot flames out of her vagina. (Since you can't call it fire-eating, would that be female fire-ejaculating?)

MOSEX isn't even up to date enough to have a proper history of lapdancing, although the only kind of lapdancing a hip New Yorker is likely to care about these days takes place at PS122. That's where Nicole Blackman does her show "Courtesan Tales"--for an audience of one. People wait in line to enter the theater, one at a time. Once inside, the sole audience member is placed in a chair on stage and blindfolded so that Nicole can grind on him while telling fairy tales and haunted house stories. (She's worked out the stories on the absinthe party circuit.) Because the audience member is blindfolded, he starts to feel invisible and will tend to do whatever she tells him to do. Inevitably the participant leaves in an "I can't believe what I just did" fog, not knowing precisely what it was that he did.

What do you call this? Is it performance art, when the only two people in the theater are both performing? Is it a sex session? (The audience member, after all, paid for admission.) Is it a show at all, when the audience can't see anything? Is it a lapdance even if you can't see the dancer or, for that matter, your lap?

Nobody knows. That's the point. It's sex but it's not sex. It would be illegal in Los Angeles, but in New York it's just another way to say, "Hey, you think that was freaky, get a load of this."

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© Copyright 2003 Joe Bob Briggs