The highly anticipated second season of the HBO series The Deuce not only brings us a reunion with James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, but also numerous opportunities for the adult industry to jump on the publicity train accompanying the series about the New York porn scene in the 70s.
The porntube and sex community company xHamster made a little joke to honor the premiere of the second season of the HBO series The Deuce featuring Hollywood star James Franco, but at the same time the company also offers a little historical lesson for New York enthusiasts. As the television series rightly tells us, Times Square, which is now a smooth, touristic spot, was a genuine hotbed of sin before mayors Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cleaned up the city in a decades long clean up sanitizing the former metropolis. The world-famous location on Times Square was the setting for the emerging porn industry in the USA, and at the same time it was home to countless adult shops, porn cinemas and illegal brothels. The lawless spaces in which the industry could develop and in which numerous people gave free rein to their sexuality were also the result of a megacity sinking into criminal chaos. By the mid-1970s, New York had become an ungovernable colossus.
While the first season of the series took place in the early 1970s and showed the very first beginnings of the porn industry in Times Square, the second season opened with a leap in time into 1977. xHamster took this opportunity to create an interactive map in which the real Times Square of 1977 was brought back to life.
The map contains all the cinemas, strip clubs and sex shops labeled as adult bookstores that turned Times Square into a Mecca for lonely souls. If you feel like it, you can look back at the sinful places, big names like Venus Theater and New Mature are listed. In total, xHamster’s porn historians have located and listed 50 cinemas, including photos, advertisements, historical details, and the closing dates of the respective shops, clubs, and cinemas.
According to the porn site, the xHamster historians used several sources. In addition to the New York Times, these were websites like Vanishing New York and old issues of magazines like Screw and Playboy, where shops and clubs advertised their establishments.
In addition to the obvious PR stunt, xHamster actually seems to have an appreciation for the history of the place. Alex Hawkins is vice president of xHamster. Commenting on the project, he said: »Times Square in the 1970s was an analog version of online porn today. You had nearly limitless options and a community of like-minded fans. We’re debt to those who came before us, and took risks to develop the industry that exists today. We wanted to excavate today’s Disney-fied Times Square, to show the world that existed and thrived four decades ago.«
The detailed, lovingly crafted map can be accessed on xHamster’s blog. The 2nd season of the series The Deuce can be watched in Germany via Sky. You can find the trailer here: