As the crowded tour bus circled familiar landmarks this week, the guide regaled his audience not with the tales of toe-sucking they expected, but with how the federal government has stifled sexual expression since the Civil War.
Billed as Playboy magazine’s “Sex Tour in Washington, D.C.,” the two-hour trek seemed more like a lecture at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In fact, with minor editing, it would be fit for family listening.
Offering the commentary was James Petersen, who was garbed mostly in black for the occasion. For 22 years he was the magazine’s sex adviser and is the author of its continuing series on “History of the Sexual Revolution.”
The FBI, according to Petersen, was organized to crack down on white slavery at Union Station, the starting point on the tour. But under Director J. Edgar Hoover, he continued, the agency became the “first federal sex police” with “a deviant branch to track down homosexuals and cheating husbands.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, Petersen said, as the bus rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, gays frequented Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and “lived in paranoia” for fear of encountering an undercover police officer in the lavatory.
It seems that the tables have been turned, however, in the 1990s. “Heterosexuals live in fear in the workplace,” Petersen insisted, because of sexual harassment suits. It’s a costly business, he added, but the good guys are winning.
As the tour went on–passengers on this maiden voyage primarily were members of the press–it became clear that the thrust of Petersen’s commentary was more polemic than prurient.
Although he did not neglect some of Washington’s more lurid moments–he allowed as how the White House seemed more like a Playboy Club than an official residence during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s–he also dwelled on two historical figures who head up Playboy’s hit list: James Mann (1856-1922), the Chicago congressman whose Mann Act was directed at prostitution, and Arthur Comstock (1844-1915), a reformer who successfully promoted laws barring sexually explicit materials and information about birth control and abortion from the mails.
Petersen’s philosophy is simple: Sex should be liberated and returned to the control of the individual rather than the church and state.
Among his other P.A. system observations:
– “Unless we are comfortable with the sex lives of our parents and presidents, we won’t be comfortable with our own.”
– Power couples, like a president and first lady, shouldn’t have to follow the rules of “mom and pop sex.”
– He wouldn’t mind seeing lines from Henry Miller novels, once considered pornographic, memorialized in limestone in the nation’s capital.
Dropped from the press tour, incidentally, were the Georgetown house where former presidential candidate Gary Hart conducted an affair with Miami model Donna Rice, and the Tidal Basin, into which stripper Fanne Foxe jumped to avoid being arrested in 1974 with a drunken Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), then powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Petersen, who admitted he has visited the nation’s capital only three times, will lead the full tour Saturday and Sunday for the public. Tickets will cost $10, with the proceeds benefiting Feminists for Free Expression, described as the only feminist anti-censorship organization.
This fall Petersen played tour guide for similar treks around New York City. San Francisco is still to come.
Asked why Playboy has no plans for sex tours of Chicago, the magazine’s birthplace, and Los Angeles, founder Hugh Hefner’s current home base, tour organizer Seth Kamil explained that Chicago is “too spread out,” while Los Angeles is “too difficult.”
As for New Orleans, he said that city never had a sex revolution because it didn’t need one.
