Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

[amado1]

"Three months back, the neighborhood's adult video stores were forbidden to display their sexual material to the passing pedestrian public. Until recently their windows had been mosaics of colorful videocassette boxes, with pictures of naked women (and often a smaller window of naked men), blond and black and Asian. Now, with white or brown wrapping paper stuck up behind the glass, they look somewhere between comic and just weird. Many have grudgingly followed the city mandate to stock 60 percent minimum "family fare." One is reminded of seventeenth-century London and Marseille's response to the plague -- though here the plague may just be that pleasant suburban couple, lawyer and doctor, herding their 2.3 children ahead of them, out the door of the airport van and into the Milford Plaza; or at least the family values, perhaps too easily, they might be taken by some to represent. But, the city has said to the video stores with Draconian finality, "Sixty percent--or get out." If the concern were actually for the morals of those 2.3 youngsters, it might be excusable. (Though streets such as these may, someday, feed their appetites, they do not create such appetites.) But it is only a continuation--or rather, the recent inflation--of a policy that has ruled the neighborhood for three decades or more. Make any small business there as unprofitable as possible so that much bigger ones can buy them up cheaply; receive a certain amount of social approbation in the process, and proceed to replace them."

--Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue