It's as brash and bold as the city itself. With images ranging from 19th-century French postcards to the tangle of 1970s group sex, the companion book to the Museum of Sex's inaugural exhibit leaves few erotic stone unturned. You'll see it all in NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America -- gorgeous depictions of trannies, muscle men, strippers, porn goddesses, orgies, and leather folk. And you won't just find modern depictions of New York City sex. You'll also see early examples of erotic materials, like the 1859 Directory to the Seraglios, which described many of the city's brothels, and the deathbed lithograph of murdered prostitute Helen Jewitt, a print made erotic by the dead woman's exposed breasts.

If you come for the dirty pictures, be sure to stay for the eye-opening dialogue. Where the opening chapter, Sodom on the Hudson, recounts the city's sexual steam from its early 19th-century commercial origins up to the mid-1950s, its subsequent chapters are roundtable discussions about modern gay culture, prostitution, the sexual underground, and pornography, told by those who actually lived the episodes. Martin Duberman and Joan Nestle recount pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian life while Tracy Quan and Xaviera Hollander (with historian Timothy Gilfoyle) discuss the ways of prostitution. Performance artist Karen Finley, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author Luc Sante, and Kiss rocker Gene Simmons examine the sexual underground while former porn star Vanessa del Rio, sex guru Annie Sprinkle, and author Legs McNeil recount the how film porn, peeps, and exotic dancing blasted into the 1970s and beyond.

Each chapter has its own fascinating revelations for readers to discover. Like how the medical community viewed homosexuality as such an aberration that psychosexual medical books showed homosexual bodies as actually deformed. Or the risks gay and lesbian people took when cruising in the 1950s. Lesbians out to sneak a department store quickie would bring a shopping bag into the changing room so one of them could stand in it and escape the detection of vice policewomen. Yes, only one woman to a dressing room back then.

Unfortunately, where the gay and lesbian chapters were highly revealing of the gay life's risks and triumphs, the other chapters weren't quite so expansive. The chapter on prostitution focused on the madam/call girl world and did little to shine a light on the persona we're more familiar with, the streetwalker. Male prostitution earned a passing mention, but tranny hookers are completely ignored. Same with the porn chapter, really, and because I've heard more stories from men about their "first encounters" with city trannies -- and the memorable impression it made on them -- I find it a little surprising to see them so completely ignored in the various dialogues.

Still, the discussions have other, unexpected moments as well. While Quan and Hollander point out the sex-loving basis for their business, they somewhat diss the spiritualism of the Annie Sprinkle types. The schism is quietly noticeable: Annie Sprinkle joins in the porn discussion rather than the prostitution discussion and, yes indeed, the slut goddess does get mentioned in that section. (But so does the rise of dancing and peep shows, giving a broader look at pornography before it headed west.) Likewise, differences of opinion between the art scene and the rock scene almost morph into class warfare -- and in the process utterly fails to acknowledge the sadomasochistic and group sex scenes that very much constituted the sexual underground at that time.

Well, there's the rub, really. Roundtable dialogues are, by nature, limited to the experiences and viewpoints of the participants. Fortunately, you can counter that pitfall by relying on the many captioned photographs to round out the sexual history of the city. What's not discussed textually is depicted visually. Truly, the book works like a topically organized time line with people standing around talking about their place in that history.

As incredible as the meld of photo time lines and topical dialogues is, the book has two standout problems. First, there's a historical big black hole running roughly from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s where little is said about the proliferation of print pornography in the years after Betty Page and before X-rated films and live nude girls. Little is said about the transformation of 42nd Street from movie-and-arcade center to porn mecca. I can't imagine that the mob’s currently so strong (or the story’s so detestable) that it renders this portion of New York City's erotic history untouchable or undiscoverable. Especially since I've met at least one old print pornographer from those times and, to me, he’s nothing more than a delightful horn dog who likes to talk about old times. Really, there's a story to be told there and I want to hear it.

On a completely different note, I found the book had one nasty habit. The coated paper selected for the book's interior pages holds black ink in such a way that every time you handle a predominately black page, it smudges with your fingerprints. You can see where you've thumbed through the book, and, well, it feels kind of dirty. But then again, maybe that's appropriate. Maybe that reminds us that, at one time, many of us felt that sex was grimy and gritty.

So I'll stand corrected. The book's bold and brash and gritty. And, minor shortcomings aside, very much worth your time.

This article previously appeared at the now-defunct Yes Portal website as part of its news and entertainment coverage.