Description: In The Soft City, the ethnographer Terry Williams ventures deep into the underground world of sex in New York. The book explores different aspects of the "perverse space" of the city: porn theaters, sex shops, peep shows, restroom cruising, sadomasochism clubs, swingers' events, and many more.
Review Quotes: The Soft City is a time-machine ride to a vanished New York, one in which the sex trade was wide-open--at once brazen and furtive, anonymous and eccentric, mundane and bizarre, outrageous and straitjacketed by repression. The impressive level of detail steeps the reader in all the sights, sounds, and even smells that cannot be experienced in today's world of distanced online pornography.--Luc Sante, Bard College