It’s not porno, It’s ART!
The Erotic Museum
Carl F Gauze
I admit I’m in love with these small specialty museums scattered across the land. Whether it’s the Honey museum in Ashippun, Wisconsin or the Funeral Museum in Houston, I’ll go out of my way to see a collection of stuff you never thought anyone would collect. While wandering down Hollywood Boulevard, I happened on this private collection of erotica housed in a spacious storefront near the other major tourist dings, Ripley’s and Guiness. The Museum of Erotica has a small, scattered, but highly entertaining collection of Chinese jades, art films, ’50s nudies, and dildos.
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The jades are interesting, and the closest to what most folks would consider museum-quality art. I assume they are authentic, and they feature various sexual positions including the famous Man Screwing Goose. The goose did NOT seem as enthused as the man. Upstairs, we find a well-lit space housing an extremely comprehensive collection of dildos, Nudie Viewmaster slides, and an extremely painful-looking sculpture with a bicycle pedal driven penetrator. A glove box, normally used by chemists to handle radioactive or other hazardous material, allows civilians to handle breast implants and sex toys, although you can touch them for real within a block or two of this location. A semi-erotic Japanese mahjong machine occupies the corner, and there’s even some ancient ASCII art erotica. Down in the back we find some original gay pencil drawings by the vaguely famous Tom of Finland, along with a smattering of other sexually explicit art.
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The collection is certainly interesting, but spotty. There’s relatively little fetish material, excepting a life-size set of Russian dolls that depict a few standard perversions. After the ancient Chinese stuff, sex appears to pick up again around WW2. These IS a replica of Marilyn Monroe’s FBI file, and a some contemporary oil paintings of “Sexual Pioneers” – Margaret Sanger, Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and even Woody Allen, which is bit of a stretch in my mind. Still, it’s a fun place, and worth taking the trouble to seek it out, just a few blocks east of Grauman’s.
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The Erotic Museum is located at 6741 Hollywood Blvd in Los Angles. Admission was $12.95 at last report.
