The Sexual Counter-Revolution is upon us, and it came not with a bang or a whimper -- but with the shiny, smiley, three-day spectacle that was Erotica USA, self-described as "the world's leading exposition of romance, adventure and sensuality". Within New York City's vast, crystal-palace-like Javits Convention Center, hundreds of exhibitors and countless spectators gathered last month to commemorate the many varieties of commercial carnality which, until recently, ran wild, if not free, in these selfsame Manhattan streets.

Ten years ago, an "erotica" trade show in the shadow of Times Square -- where round-the-clock erotica was once both trade and show -- would have been a laughable redundancy. Then fast-forward to the desexualization of 42nd Street and vicinity by New York's Republican mayor -- who served notice that explicit, orgasmic sex and its many graphic manifestations would henceforth be found behind closed doors and under brown paper wrappers.

It was in this self-contradictory spirit of "Porn is dead, long live porn!" that Erotica USA's smutly swan song rang out against both its own stagnation and the ever-more-suppressive municipal backdrop. Mayor Giuliani had vociferously and ominously declared his opposition to the event -- such that Erotica USA was pervaded by the possibility that, under existing city law, any "offensive" display -- i.e., prurient focus on human nipples, pudendums or perineal regions -- would bring police intervention.

Body modification was, in fact, the only commercially available interplay of bodily intimacies that the Giuliani Administration had chosen not to criminalize -- and, in fact, had actually encouraged through New York City's 1998 legalized-tattooing law. Consequently, as wet, pink, commercialized sex became not only scarcer but more expensive, the public found new avenues of access to piercings and other enhancements that once typified only the most spectral fetish salons, arcane tribal rites, or now-vanished Times Square live-peep emporiums

Erotica USA's apogee of explicitude was the labial-and-clitoral-piercing video loop beckoning from the booth of exhibitor Andromeda -- the planet's foremost provider of walk-in genital piercings as well as more extreme interventions. Andromeda's wet, pink genital demo rolled without incident as it drew spectators for three days and nights, whilst elsewhere on the convention floor, aureoles, bikini-lines and butt-cracks -- both on the hoof and as depicted on video boxes and magazine covers -- were being meticulously taped and draped for fear of drawing official ire in the publicly funded Javits Center.

Unmistakable evidence here pointed to soft-tissue modification's ascendancy over orgasmicism.

Body art as future sex?

That was the view from St. Marks Place, the fevered ,historically charged commercial artery from which Andromeda taps much of its exuberant, often impulsive, fetish-into-fashion clientele.

Andromeda's Mikel -- formerly known as "NeoSporic Flesh Mechanic" -- operates under the designation "Flesh Mechanic", and draws upon medical innovation for his art in much the same way a dub artist samples symphonic music into the dance mix. Mikel explains to The Soft Toy Department that his impressive workaday knowledge of medicine stems in part from the fact that several members of his family work in the plastic and reconstructive surgery field. Mikel -- who has completed an original fleshscape that will be featured in an upcoming, fetish-driven Calvin Klein campaign -- also inhabits a micro-culture of simpatico medics and techies working in local hospitals and conferencing on-line.

Confides Mikel: "A good body artist needs to keep up on medicine. You've got to know some dermatology to know, for instance, how different layers of skin can be used to achieve different degrees of scarring. You've got to know some pharmacology, and you've got to be getting upgraded information on tools, materials, liquids, sterilization. It's two lanes on the same highway. In a sense, the art of implanting, scarring and piercing sells the same concept as the medical professionals are doing -- only we're giving tangible, specific results without the jargon and the false promises."

Speaking of which, Erotica USA's passel of plastic-surgery exhibitors circulated a tear-sheet from PSNews Bulletin -- a periodical of "Breaking news from the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons". The message, dated 12-1-98: "National science panel finds no evidence linking silicone breast implants to systemic disease." The conclusion: A clean bill of health for "the possibility of a causal association between silicone breast implants and connective tissue diseases, related signs and symptoms and immune system dysfunction."

Towards this inconclusive end, various cosmetic-surgery exhibitors invited attendees, including The Soft Toy Department, to palpate the latest in liquid-filled breast implants, and to contemplate other areas of human frailty that medical science can now address: spider veins [using lasers and sclerosing-solution injections] ; stretchmarks and scars [lasers]; shriveled lips [collagen-replacement therapy], crow's feet and frown lines [Botox injections] ; and for the penitent, tattoo removal via laser.

The Soft Toy Department predicts, by the time next year's Erotica USA arrives, that many of these "reconstructive" techniques will already have found their way into the deconstructive tool-kits of Andromeda and like-minded practitioners of the fleshly arts.

Meanwhile, amid Erotica USA's churning crowd of pricksters, hucksters and pricksteristic hucksters -- such as self-fellating porn presence Ron Jeremy and Screw's paunchy potentate Al Goldstein -- the not-for-profit Free Speech Coalition's Bill Margold offered a refreshing departure from porn's oxymoronic "free market".

Like The Soft Toy Department, Margold spits in the eye of market forces. Significantly, the Free Speech Coalition was the only Erotica USA exhibitor with a donated booth -- an index of Margold's wide repute as the conscience of porndom. This rep figures prominently in the May/June '99 Gear magazine's profile of vanished late-1980s porn legend Viper -- who remains the most unquenchable passion ever to penetrate Margold's passion-filled life and times.

Gear's Mark Ebner spins a tale of a former ballerina, and nympholeptic ex-Marine -- 86'd from the military for reasons that "remain officially undisclosed" -- destined for immolation on the altar of her own tattoos. [Editor's note: Viper was also a friend of bodmod icon Fakir Musafar. Her breast enlargement procedure, mentioned in the GEAR article, was featured as body art in Fakir's BODY PLAY magazine.] According to Ebner, the apple-cheeked female once known as Corporal Stephanie Green became "...a thin, red-headed, green-eyed virago" who "boasted chain piercings, a full-torso tattoo, and a sexual aggressiveness, on-screen and off, that challenged even the most seasoned professionals..." Including Bill Margold -- who briefed The Soft Toy Department on the parts that Gear left out.

"Porners just couldn't deal with the tattoos back then", recalled Margold, whose own old-school sensibilities make him -- despite, or perhaps because of, his love for Viper -- no fan of voluntary body modification in any form.

"There was one other tattooed actress doing X videos in the Eighties, Janey Robbins, who just had a dragon on her back. Directors always felt they had to cut away from it. Not good for Janey's career. Directors camera would always shoot away. Today, porn is filled with tattoos and piercings of every kind. But Viper was one tragic step ahead of the fetish-into-fashion wave in porn.

Mark Ebner's high-octane prose describes the dermal imprint that destroyed Viper: "...a snake poised to strike her left nipple, that morphs into a tiger composed of interlaced skulls across her belly, and finally reanimates as a snake snapping at her clitoris."

This was the work-product of hard-case, amphetamine-dizzed Philadelphia inker Harry Von Groff -- regarding whom Bill Margold related an episode from one of tattooing's darker vaults.

Margold told The Soft Toy Department: "VonGroff had stolen Viper's soul. Viper said she wanted it back. So I traveled from LA to Von Grofff's tattoo shop on Arch Street in Philly to get Viper's soul back."

"This was 1986. The Detroit Lions were in town to play the Philadelphia Eagles. Before the game, Viper took me in to see VonGroff. He was in a wheelchair. He made me watch him tattoo three people. He also made me watch him sell dope -- and some weapons. Finally he says to me, "What are you here for?""

"And I answered, 'I'm here to get Viper's soul back.' "

"'Why do you want her?'," VonGroff shot back."

""Because I like her.""

"And Von Groff said, "If you had said because you loved her, I wouldn't have given her soul back.""

"The next day was Sunday, and when I came back from the football game, Viper thanked me ."

"'For what?', I asked her.

"Viper answered that VonGroff had truly given back her soul."

"Not too long thereafter, Viper wrote Von Groff a letter and it came back stamped "Deceased".

"Somebody had shot vonGroff dead in his own tattoo parlor."

"There's a great spirituality to the whole thing. And it's a cautionary tale to those who would deal in souls."

Summarized Margold, "Von Groff got exactly what he deserved."

Viper's whereabouts remain unknown.

And it was at some indeterminate point on the first day of Erotica USA that news arrived of another tragedy: Annie Sprinkle's Sausalito, California houseboat had been destroyed in a fire that took all her archives and her two beloved cats. This information came by way of Annie's longtime collaborator and transmedia sex artist Veronica Vera, whose exhibit is devoted to her Miss Vera's School for Boys Who Want To Be Girls transformation academy.

It would take the New York Post's "Page Six" gossip sleuths a week-and-a-half to pick up on the Annie Sprinkle misadventure -- by which time enterprising Bill Margold's other non-profit organization, PAW (Protecting Adult Welfare) had already unleashed a star-studded, smut-stoked "Save Annie" relief fund and hotline.

All told, the Sausalito houseboat blaze would ultimately inspire many in attendance at Erotica USA -- including The Soft Toy Department -- to reflect on how they'd been touched, in fact or in reverie, by Annie Sprinkle....

Among those falling squarely into the many-faceted, Sprinklesque canon of radical sex and ritual exhibitionism was Matty Jankowski -- whose Sacred Body Arts/New York Body Archive installation here, nearby Margold's booth, was one of the first to greet spectators as they arrived.

Noted Jankowski, "For a lot of the porn-oriented visitors, our exhibit was their first taste of serious fetish art."

Jankowski's Body Archive was Erotica USA's only other notable exception to the no-exposed-nipple-or-genitalia rule -- and surveyed more than 20 practitioners of fine-art and documentary transgression. Featured was photography by the omnipresent Charles Gatewood -- and Efram Gonzales, an increasingly visible presence in such venues as Tattoo Savage and In The Flesh.

Longtime collector Jankowski, who will be hosting a Gatewood exhibit of new work later this month, considers Gonzales to be one of photography's most privileged windows on "forbidden" sexualities: "Efram gets invited to document very private S&M and fetish scenes around the country. He was among the very first to seriously cover branding, cutting and scarification in ways that are beautiful beyond description."

Among the offerings of the upcoming Gatewood exhibit at Sacred Body Arts/New York Body Archive -- timed to coincide with the Second Annual New York City Tattoo Convention at Roseland -- will be an image documenting a scene from a performance accompanying Gatewood's last major exhibition on the East Coast.

"It's a really tight head shot of David Aaron Clark with his face pierced by 40 hypodermic needles", explained Jankowski. "It was the result of an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most piercings in the shortest time. The piercings were done by Leda."

At the mention of Leda's name, it was clear that the kind of moment that The Soft Toy Department lives for was at hand: not only is David Aaron Clark a regular apparition in these chronicles -- but Leda, in an obscure but influential cinematic moment, Richard Kern's The Sewing Circle, performs a lyrical sewing-up of Kembra Pfahler's shaved vaginal lips....not unlike Andomeda's video at Erotica USA!

So it is barely possible to describe The Soft Toy Department's sense of synchronicity a week later in encountering the mythic Kembra Pfahler in person -- at the Greenwich Village nightclub Life, to witness the unveiling of photo phenom Katrina del Mar's latest exhibit American Toughie. Here, del Mar's probing lens and lovingly manipulated prints pay unflinching homage to the polymorphic preversity of today's rough-trade urban youth.

Meanwhile, back at the raunch, the spectre of Harry VonGroff lives on in The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where penile amputee Joe Christ -- who resides in Lancaster with spouse Nancy A. Collins, the "extreme-horror" writer -- continues to make headlines...if only on Usenet.

Those who remember Joe Christ's observations that the NYPD officers now on trial for feloniously invading the rectum of Abner Louima "contaminated a perfectly good plunger" will not be surprised by the penectomized underground-video star's recent attempts to cash in on the Columbine High School massacre.

"Joe Christ weighed in with His mighty opinion", revealed writer Lisa Rose of The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest newspaper. "He was responding to a post I put in alt.goth regarding the Colorado shooting."

Joe Christ's numerous observations in alt.goth on the Columbine massacre are clearly the bruised fruit of Mr. and Mrs. Nancy A. Collins' own ignominious experience in the Denver area, culminating several years ago in a pepper-spray attack on the nihilistic nullo at a bar where Boyd Rice was deejaying.

Joe Christ, whose credentials as an applied-thanatology pundit include the video "sex-comedy" Is It Snuff? You Decide! -- in which "a screen-test for a low-budget porn flick quickly turns to rape, murder & necrophilia" -- offered up this newsflash from the goth frontiers:: ".... since I don't own a black trench coat, I had to borrow one from my wife, to go to WalMart..."

Is it eros? Or thanatos? You decide.