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San Francisco, California, United States
S3X Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery established in 2011, dedicated to promoting national and international artists, delivering original erotic fine art to established and emerging collectors and catering to special events. S3X Gallery was created in the very heart of San Francisco with the goal of furnishing the city with a centre of didactic information, based on a prolific theme, one found throughout humanity's history and across every culture: EROTICA. Visitors to the gallery can contemplate the development of eroticism through the various artistic and cultural facets of the human being: anthropology, archaeology, literature, plastic arts, history, antiquities, etc.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Article: Erotic City - How San Francisco went from prudish to porn capital


EXCERPT FROM THE ARTICLE: Erotic City - How San Francisco went from prudish to porn capital

In obvious ways, and in ways less obvious, sex shapes city living. That's true in all cities, of course, but in San Francisco — well, come on, it's San Francisco. "Yet, contrary to common lore," Josh Sides writes, "nothing in San Francisco's history determined it to become an internationally renowned bastion of sexual libertinism. Instead, sex radicals created it, despite fierce resistance from several generations of the city's residents."

Sides' new book, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, delves deeply into familiar and forgotten matters of hedonists versus moralists, but with a big-picture perspective and a plain and simple premise: that comprehending urban culture depends very much on comprehending sexual culture, here and everywhere. As Sides puts it, "San Francisco's street-level battles over prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, nudism, transgenderism, 'social diseases,' AIDS, and marriage have prefigured the nation's for over half a century."

Sides has a knack for showing how the city's sexual and cultural evolution has not occurred linearly, but instead through an intense series of pendulum swings and other contrary movements. He reminds us, for instance, how the creators of On Our Backs, the first sex-positive feminist porn mag and (eventually) a beacon of late-'80s lesbian culture, got booed and almost beaten up for their explicitness at the 1985 Frameline film festival. "When On Our Backs sponsored a night of female erotica with Susie Bright at the Castro Theatre in 1989, the response was quite different from that in 1985," Sides writes. "The lesbian crowd spilled onto the streets; there were complaints again — this time the chief complaint that there was not sufficient lesbian erotica to satisfy demand." As for the "unspoken sexuality of Golden Gate Park," suffice it to say it now has been spoken. And it is hard to imagine what the writers of those editorials criticizing public hugging in the park in the 1870s would make of the Speedway Meadows Be-Ins and Gay-Ins about a century later.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

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