CARNAL NATION

The Forbidden Apple
By Kat Long
Ig Publishing, 288 pp.

Sitting here, right now, at the kitchen table, I can count no less than eight books detailing the various histories of New York City. Gay histories, Black histories, Irish histories, Women's histories, Film histories, Secret histories, all possible permutations of historical viewpoints. So a history of sex in the city wouldn't be out of place. The Forbidden Apple promises to be just that—an exploration of the sexual movements and battles born inside the five boroughs.

Except it isn't. The Forbidden Apple is not so much a history of sex as it is a history of Ms. Long's personal obsessions and peeves, delivered in the sandpaper style of a schoolteacher rushing through a review course.

The early chapters are all familiar ground for readers of Low Life or Gay New York and their ilk. The same names and faces pop up again and again, the same old quotations and source materials are dragged out for the modern reader to be aghast at. 'Gilded Age' New York isn't exactly terra obscura, especially for the kind of reader the book is aiming for. I did appreciate the occasional new nugget, such as the eccentric heiress A'lelia Walker and the hilariously-named "Legion Of Decency", which brings to mind a group of Fundamentalist Superfriends. The book also helps keep the interminable number of committees, groups, leagues, societies and associations in line, confirming the belief that American culture is just staff meetings punctuated with violence.

Still, Ms. Long's style errs too dry for my liking, and she manages to be academic without being very thorough. While her focus on the use of licensing to curb vice-related business helps explain why NYC has some of the most colorful cabaret and zoning laws in the nation, she never dwells on any one thing long enough for it to sink in. The facts, the many, many facts, just sit on the surface. It runs like an annotated time-line, all a kind of mad rush to the end as whole decades flash by before we have a chance to catch-up. We're signing with Bessie Smith and then we're cruising in the park, and then its the mob control of peepshows, the ins and outs of "sexploitation" films, and porno chic, and then AIDS and Andrea Dworkin wield their buzz-killing powers and the whole party crashes to a halt.

It's then that the book reveals its true passion: legal precedent and building codes. While the first half zoomed by, the second half grinds to a halt to discuss Times Square and the efforts to make it the well-scrubbed Disneyland of today. Intriguing bits of New York in the 80s-90s (Drag balls! The Hellfire Club! Babeland! DUMBA!) are completely ignored in favor of congressional hearings and block associations. While it's nice to know how Guilani got rid of the Squeegee men, (I assumed he just had them ground into paste and fed to geese), it doesn't make for a gripping read.

Books such as these, the kind of book I think The Forbidden Apple wants to be, carry the assumption that they'll provide either in-depth reporting or a constant stream of entertaining anecdotes. In trying to do both, it's given itself a serious identity crisis: too shallow to be a real scholarly work and yet too dry to be a popular hit. This could be an excellent book about the history of Times Square; indeed almost all of the chapters could be expanded into worthy portraits of Sex in New York. Instead, they're all rushed together, treading well-worn material at first and then losing the plot halfway. Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser had a similar three-books-pasted-into-one feeling, but this feels even flimsier. Like a peep show, The Forbidden Apple leaves you feeling faintly disappointed and slightly ripped off.