Spare a thought for the members of the Republican National Convention who, in two weeks' time, may have to avert their eyes when they walk to their midtown hotels past a building with whitewashed windows - New York's very own "Museum of Sex", writes Colum McCann
The two-storey museum, founded in 2002 by software entrepreneur Daniel Gluck, is not the sort of place that New York used to have, shovelled down some grimy sidestreet, decked out with neon Triple Xs and leggy cocktail glasses. (God be with the days when New York had a little bit of grime.)
The museum sits unabashedly on Fifth Avenue, just five blocks from where the convention will take place. In older parlance, it would have been a classy joint.
The art of the tease is minimal: the signage is discreet, the entrance is well-lit, the rude boys are kept out by the fee ($17) and the space feels more like a souped-up Soho loft.
The mission of the museum is "to preserve and present the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality", which if not a mouthful, is at least a leg-up on the old memories of dear ol' dirty Times Square.
The museum features multi-media displays on diverse subjects: prostitution, burlesque shows, birth control, lesbian pulp fiction, and fetishism among them.
For the Republican Convention the main feature will be Sex Among the Lotus: 2000 years of the Chinese Erotic Expression, which might of course be civil-rights news to George Bush. God forbid that the Republican nominee or his vice-president (so to speak) be found standing near the S&M paraphernalia.
It would only take moments for the truly terrifying photos at Abu Ghraib to come to mind.
There are Depression-era films shown on loop on the second floor of the museum. In one of the silent films a car runs out of petrol, two under-clad damsels in distress wait by the side of the road, a Good Samaritan comes along and they have a graphic sexual tussle together in the dark forest - all interesting metaphors if applied to the current political situation.
But perhaps the more interesting notion here is that New York needs a reminder at all, especially for one of its former pastimes.
It was of course a Republican mayor in a Democratic town who got rid of the seedy side of Manhattan - in the 1990s Rudi Giuliani frog-marched in and began to house-break the wild side.
Nightclubs were shut down. Brothels on Central Park East were raided. An erotic doll-making factory on Broadway was closed down and moved to, of all places, China.
And now one of the few places in New York where sex is actually sold is in a Fifth Avenue museum.
The thing is that New York used to be a city that never paid any attention to its history: the past was for an altogether different country.
But more and more monuments are popping up - the Irish famine memorial, the American-Indian museum, the Tenement Museum.
Nothing wrong with any of this, of course, except that the past is increasingly exploited for political gain - because they were wealthier, Irish politicians were able to get their hands on a chunk of prime downtown real estate, near the World Trade Centre, in memory of the Famine. They slapped a "lepracorny" Irish cottage on a quarter-acre of land. Within months the cottage began falling down.
The monument is not a mark of pride or memory at all: it is an ironic talisman of short-sighted greed and jumped-up nationalism.
Predictably, and rightly, the African-American politicians piped up to say that there was no recognition of a subject that had a greater impact on the American landscape: slavery. We too want a downtown museum, they said.
This land is my land, this land ain't your land.
Soon everyone will want a museum in downtown New York, irregardless of the present or the future.
Which is exactly the mentality that Republican National Convention is exploiting this month. They are making a virtual museum out of the World Trade Centre.
They will capitalise on the terrible tragedy of three years ago and pay absolutely no respect to the other tragedies that fed off it.
George Bush will go downtown and salute the flag that still stands in a bombed-out pit. He will reach out and squeeze the heart of the American voter bone-dry. It is a cool, callous political move. Politically New York is a backwater - everyone knows that John Kerry will sweep it - but the landscape is being used as a cinematic backdrop to what the Republicans consider one of their signature accomplishments, the protection of the homeland.
Once again: the art of the tease.
But New York, despite another Republican mayor, is no GOP homeland. Many city dwellers, or those that can, are getting out of the city for the three days. The younger ones have organised protests. There was a whiff of potential riots a few months ago, but that seems to have calmed down: the protest groups are splintered, much to the delight of the New York Police Department, which is on full alert. There will still be massive protests, it seems, but with George Bush water-dunking booths and the symbolic clogging of traffic by bicycle riders.
For the commerce of New York it will be a bad weekend - most businesses expect that they will lose money.
And the Museum of Sex, down in trendy Chelsea, will probably get by-passed. A lot of Republicans don't do sex very well, especially the far-right Christians who, while hiding the whip, would rather pretend that these things don't exist.
The more fun-loving among the GOP tribe might treat the museum like a Guinness brewery tour - and expect the metaphorical pint at the end of it all, but that sort of trade is a thing of the past in New York.
The girls and the boys on the corner, this season, are much more likely to be hawking their vote.
Colum McCann is an Irish writer based in New York