In an era of a rock revolution, rebellious musicians in the 70s and 80s knew they wanted to make people uncomfortable, and they exploited sex to do so.
The Museum of Sex in New York City is displaying “Punk Lust: Raw Provocation” until Nov 30, 2019. The exhibition includes a collection of photographs, musician memorabilia and artwork that represent the conjunction of punk culture and sexuality.
The atmosphere was rowdy, with fast-paced music booming over speakers and a cardboard cutout of Iggy Pop brandishing his genitals greeting you at the entrance.
Other icons highlighted in the exhibit were Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and Tish and Snooky Bellomo.
Infinite chaos was on display: a shrine to the Sex Pistols, high-definition hardcore pornographic images, tattered Vivienne Westwood shirts, pins and buttons, photo prints showing sweaty bodies writhing and laying atop one another with guitars in hand.
The exhibit — co-curated by photographer Lissa Rivera, American cultural critic Carlo McCormick and writer Vivien Goldman — is a straightforward representation of how musicians responsible for the birth of punk rock used sex to promote hellacious rebellion and fluidity in the face of growing societal norms.
Integrity through rawness and shamelessness was the core of the lifestyle.
Sex — not just as an act but as an idea — became the perfect vehicle for pushing boundaries and shocking the world.
“A true punk dressed like a punk, lived in anti-establishment opposition like a punk, but, presumably, also ate like a punk and f***** like a punk,” Thom Bettridge of Interview Magazine said. Women were expressing dominance, yelling into microphones and taking hold of sex toys like they were trophies. Men were thrashing in sweaty basement crowds and rocking out in fetish-wear. The public was consistently offended. The scene was nasty.
“Rather than an act of body-positive worship, lust according to the punk worldview is an act of defilement — and poetry is found in this physical fragility,” Bettridge writes.
People in the punk scene were not afraid to hold their own sexuality back. In an interview between Rivera and Rolling Stone, Rivera revealed that the creators of the exhibit found a “surprising amount” of punks who were also engaged in sex work at the time. “Sylvia Reed, Lou Reed’s wife and manager, was a dominatrix,” Elisabeth Garber-Paul of Rolling Stone said. “So was Poison Ivy, who used the earnings to keep her band the Cramps afloat.”
Garber-Paul explained that there was not much money to be made as a punk and dabbling in sex work helped them financially.
The exhibit at the NYC Museum of Sex shines a spotlight on these characters, because as Riveria explained to Garber-Paul, there are not many accounts discussing sex work in punk history.
Rivera added that the curators were “careful to not present it as something these artists and musicians were forced into.”
The history of sex in punk is a concrete example of a subculture presenting gender non-conformity and sexual freedom to the world. The fashion, attitude and uniqueness of early punk culture honed sex in a way that will never be done again and changed the way the public will think about sex forever.
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Edited by Sydney Keener