Submarine Attack!

From the BlackBook archives...

In 1998, Terry Richardson debuts his "These Colors Don't Run" show at Alleged Gallery; critics eat it up.

By Anthony Haden-Guest

It was the Year of the Little Blue Dress and the Year of the Little Blue Pill, and how great was that? A generation (mine) had flourished between the two Ps—the Pill and the Plague—but along with AIDS had come long years of funk, not a withdrawal from sex, but an ambient dread and a squeamishness, a sense that the reckless abandon that had seemed so desirable in the ’60s and ’70s had to be binned along with sideburns, bellbottoms and big-hair bands.

Then on January 17, Matt Drudge broke the news that Newsweek was sitting on the Monica Lewinsky story. Not just that. On March 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced that they had OK’d Viagra. The drug, sildenafil citrate, was developed by Pfizer, Inc. in Sandwich, Kent, in Southeast England, as a cure for angina. Alert scientists—Peter Dunn and Albert Wood—discovered that it had little effect on angina but where the nonperforming male member was concerned, it could turn the Leaning Tower of Pisa into the Empire State. The word Viagra, by the way, is Sanskrit for “tiger” and rhymes with Niagara, so it didn’t hurt that it also referenced an unending fluid whoosh and a movie starring Marilyn Monroe.

The Year of Sex had begun.

Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp. Could the Year of Sex have had an unlikelier cast? But that made it OK, too. Sex wasn’t just a sort of gossamer aerobics practiced only among the Kens and Barbies in TV land. It was cheerful and tearful, naughty but nice, slimy and sweaty, a grunting and a grappling, and, yes, a Monica Lewinsky could nab an alpha male like the President of the United States. So sex was not only OK, it was again what it had always been, a principal motive for making money, art, and mischief, our culture’s main event.

We had the Starr Report, the interviews, the tapes, an endless gushing river of hypnotic trivia, including—surely a first in celebrity politics—a particularized account of the presidential penis. On September 22, no fewer than six photos of Clinton, taken during his appearance on the unctuous Starr’s grand jury, ran on the front page of the New York Times. A headline read “Weighing Shame and Sympathy, A Weary People Watch Clinton.” There were seven wearying pages more—eight, if you count the Op Ed page—and a photo of the blue dress.

Which, it turned out, Monica had been about to drop off at the cleaners when Matt Drudge broke the story. Suppose she had gone the day before? Would the cloudy sexual reverie ever end? Well, yes. On page six of that same edition of the Times there were stories about the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the indictment of a Texan linked to a little-known Arab named Osama bin Laden.

How blissfully innocent our Year of Sex seems now.