Sex a Hot New
Market in City
Fantasies replace real thing
as sales soar

By MIGUEL GARCILAZO, MICHELE McPHEE
and HELEN KENNEDY
Daily News Staff Writers

When cops entered an upper West Side apartment Saturday and found a dominatrix slain amid a welter of whips and chains, they opened a small door into one of New York City's fastest-growing industries.

Sex is big business in New York. It always has been, but experts and sex trade insiders say it's now bigger and more profitable than ever.

The industry is being fueled by a fear of AIDS and a new public curiosity about what was once hidden.

Strip shows are proliferating ù and attracting a classier clientele. Raunchy sex clubs are packed, adult videos make $3 billion a year and the newsstands are groaning with new porn magazines.

"There are more gentlemen's clubs open today than there were five years ago, but where the real increase has come is in public tolerance of the adult business in general," said Don Waitt, publisher of a strip club trade journal.

And kink is coming out of the closet.

"We're doing extremely well," said Mistress Tara, the chief dominatrix at Chelsea's Den of Iniquity ù one of about 30 sado-masochistic dungeons scattered around the city.

Clients pay up to $200 an hour to be beaten and humiliated. As long as sex isn't involved, it's perfectly legal.

"All kinds of people are coming in who would never have been doing something like this 10 years ago," Mistress Tara said.

The search for new options is being driven by a fear of sex, and it has created a small army of sex workers to satisfy new appetites.

"There's such a paranoia out there," said Adam Fiveson, publisher of Xcitement, a soft-core porn magazine. "A lot of people turn to adult entertainment simply because it's relatively safe."

A Daily News poll earlier this year found that New Yorkers have less regular sex than the rest of America. Maybe that's because they have so many other options.

"The S&M scene is the fastest growing segment of the sex industry in New York," said Manhattan's Master Pasha, who hawks himself as a "slave trainer" in The Village Voice.

"S&M appeals to a lot of people," he said. "It's fun, it's safe and it's becoming more socially acceptable."

La Nouvelle Justine, a new restaurant on W. 23d St., has become the Planet Hollywood for the S&M set. Diners pay the waitresses to spank them.

Fiveson saw the burgeoning fetish market and just launched a new domination magazine in New York called Mistress Mine.

"Madonna is the mainstreaming of sex and S&M," Fiveson said. "Walk through a mall and you see these little girls and they have leashes on."

Writer Robert Vicer, 29, who frequents gay sex clubs, said, "Sex follows popular culture. We have more sexually explicit lyrics, television, movies and Internet. And it sells. Everyone knows sex sells."

Exactly how well it sells is hard to pin down.

"The sex industry doesn't put out quarterly earnings reports," said a sarcastic Gene Ross, vice president at Adult Video News, a trade journal.

Kirk Davidson, author of last year's "Selling Sin, the Marketing of Socially Unacceptable Products," estimated the sex industry is worth $20 billion a year. Ross put it closer to $50 billion.

But the trade in titillation soon could take a financial hit.

Mayor Giuliani has pushed through zoning laws ù now under appeal before the state's highest court ù to eradicate red-light districts, kill off the city's 127 sex shops and shut down the skin shows.

Times Square, once Sin Central, has been stripped of its flesh trade. But there are still 130 topless bars scattered across the five boroughs.

Ten years ago, strip club patrons skulked around in dirty raincoats. Now, they pay hefty cover charges with corporate credit cards and often have limos idling outside.

"It's changed so much, it really has," Fiveson said. "The trench coats are gone. You can't walk into Goldfingers [in Queens] if you're not wearing a suit. You feel really uncomfortable."

Movies such as Demi Moore's "Striptease" and the hilarious flop "Showgirls" have helped to glamorize nude dancing.

"Today, it seems like it's okay if daddy thinks you are a stripper, and your wife knows you are at the strip joint," said Matty Willis, a New York Press editor who freelances for porn magazines.

But for some, fantasy and voyeurism just aren't enough.

From the dismal flesh supermarket of Hunts Point in the South Bronx, where pathetic crack addicts peddle themselves for $20, to the high-priced call girls who charge 100 times that to visit hotel rooms, actual sex is for sale all over the city.

Women in the world's oldest profession are moving off the street, operating as escorts or laboring in thousands of small brothels and massage parlors.

The Manhattan Yellow Pages boasts 42 pages of escort ads ù twice the number of pages devoted to restaurants. The only larger section listing professionals for hire is the 69 pages of lawyers.

Perversely, some in the industry are wary of all the new interest.

"This growth in public acceptance really bothers me, because part of the allure of sex is that it's taboo," said Waitt. "But it's become very untaboo now."