CrushDance
Banned
'King of Porn' Empties Out His Castle
New N.Y. Museum Buys His 30-Year Collection
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 24, 2002; Page C01
In Ralph Whittington's kitchen, family photos are stuck to the refrigerator with colorful magnets. Dangling from a cabinet is a little wooden sign that reads, "Lord, Help Me Hang In There." And below the sign is a heaping helping of hard-core pornography.
Whittington sifts through the pile of smut with the close attention of a retired Library of Congress curator, which he is. There's an old peep-show film. There's a video called "Tijuana Tushy," stamped with: "Shot Live at a Filthy Whorehouse in Tijuana!" There's an old copy of a magazine called . . . well, actually you can't print the title of that magazine in a family newspaper.
Ralph Whittington's collection includes an autographed bra from porn star Chessie Moor. (Bill O'Leary - The Washington Post)
"This is just a tiny sample of the stuff in my collection," he says. "The important thing is the diversity. That's where my collection stands out."
He steps into the dining room, where a wooden dinner table is covered with a lace tablecloth, which is covered with a sheet of clear plastic. Atop the plastic is a collection of framed photographs of Whittington posing with some of the greatest porn stars of all time -- Vanessa Del Rio, Ginger Lynn, Jenna Jameson. In one picture, he's wearing a somber suit and a bright smile while a topless Candy Samples sits on his lap.
Whittington smiles nostalgically. "Of course, these photos are all copies," he says. "The museum has the originals."
That's right. The Museum of Sex -- a serious, academically credentialed museum opening in Manhattan on Sept. 23 -- has purchased all of Whittington's grip-and-grin photos of porn stars. The museum also purchased -- for a sum that remains secret -- nearly everything else in Whittington's world-famous porn collection, which had filled almost every inch of his modest brick house in Clinton.
Whittington, 57, is thrilled. He figures this vindicates his 30 years of curatorial labor in the vineyards of smut. "This should give me a little credibility," he says.
Whittington's 85-year-old mother, May, who lives with him, is also thrilled that the museum carted his collection away. She figures it'll make the house a bit neater.
"It got to the point where he had too much," she says. "He couldn't keep it clean."
Lost in the Stacks
Ralph Whittington learned his archival skills while slaving for Uncle Sam.
For 36 years -- until his retirement in 2000 -- Whittington worked at the Library of Congress. He started out fetching books and ended up as curator of the Main Reading Room. Along the way, he was given the responsibility of overseeing the library's collection of phone books.
"I was in charge of every phone book in the freaking world," he says.
Working with phone books, he learned how to organize, catalogue and archive a collection. And he took those skills home, where he was building a couple of archives of his own. The first was a collection of R&B and doo-wop music, which now includes 5,000 records. The second was pornography.
Whittington started collecting smut just for his own, um, edification. But then, in the early '70s, he had an epiphany: The Library of Congress was collecting nearly every variety of printed matter -- even phone books, for crying out loud! -- but not porn. Apparently, it was up to him to preserve the X-rated aspects of America's glorious heritage.
"All I did was use the same techniques that archivists use for other subjects on this subject," he says. "I hope you'll convey to your readers that I'm serious about this. This isn't brain surgery, but I'm not just a guy with a lot of big-breast magazines."
No, actually, he's a guy with magazines devoted to many varieties of big body parts, plus magazines and films and videos depicting . . . well, actually you can't say what some of these things depict in a family newspaper.
"The key is the diversity of the collection," he says. "To be blunt, most people buy for their own gratification. But I would spend money on stuff I didn't even like. I like high heels and big legs but I collected everything -- except gay porn and child porn."
Not only did he collect this stuff, he also catalogued it, indexed it and cross-referenced it. In 30 years, he estimates, he spent $100,000 on porn.
In 1976, his wife left him, taking their 2-year-old, Amanda. Whittington says he dealt with the pain of divorce by spending quality time with his porn collection. "It kept escalating," he says, "and when my wife left, it escalated some more."
For decades, Whittington toiled in utter obscurity. Then in 1996, documentary filmmaker Jeff Krulik -- director of the cult classic "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" -- made a short movie on Whittington. It was called "King of Porn."
"That started this whole media thing rolling," says Whittington.
Soon, he was featured in Washington's City Paper and in Spin magazine, which dubbed him the "Librarian of Sexual Congress." He was profiled in the Library of Congress's in-house newsletter, although readers had to wade through a lot about his doo-wop collection before they got to the part about pornography.
Best of all was a hilarious interview on the Comedy Central network's "Daily Show," which filmed him talking about his porn collection while his mother sat in her rocking chair, calmly crocheting.
He remembers the pride he felt when "King of Porn" was screened at the Kennedy Center.
"I called my ex-wife," he recalls, "and I said, 'I'd just like you to know that your ex-husband's film was shown at the Kennedy Center last night.' "
"I wish you could have seen his house before we took all the stuff away," says Grady Turner. "The place was packed to the rafters -- literally. Downstairs, you had to walk sideways to get through the rooms. Even his mother's closet was full of super-8s."
Turner is executive curator of the Museum of Sex. A museum-world veteran -- he used to be director of exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society -- he's the man who bought Whittington's porn collection. It will assist the museum in its mission, which is, he says, "to bring the best of contemporary scholarship on sex and sexuality to a larger audience."
Turner first learned of the Whittington Collection last year, when Whittington offered to sell it to the museum. It was getting too big for his house, he told Turner.
Turner and the museum's chief archivist, Dale Neighbors, traveled to Clinton to check out the collection. They were astounded.
"It's an incredible time capsule of a period in American pop culture when pornography went from an under-the-table, plain-brown-wrapper kind of thing to the mainstream, where you could buy it in any community," Turner says.
Whittington's collection captures the era when court decisions made most pornography legal and the advent of the VCR took porn out of peep shows and made it a multibillion-dollar industry.
"When there were technological changes and new genres emerging, Ralph was collecting it and cataloguing it," Turner says. "This is a collection you could not make now. It will be a primary source for historical research and a great repository of pop culture."
The collection -- 500 boxes stuffed with photos, films, magazines and the kind of sexual knickknacks you cannot describe in a family newspaper -- filled two huge rental trucks. When they parked on Fifth Avenue to unload, even jaded New Yorkers stopped to gawk.
"When a U-Haul opens its doors in Manhattan," says Turner, "and people start unloading boxes marked 'Gangbang' and 'Obese' and 'Ginger Lynn,' you draw a crowd."
A Collect Calling
May Whittington is sitting in her rocking chair, remembering the day her little baby discovered smut. He found his first dirty picture on a park bench during a second-grade field trip to Baltimore.
"I sat down and explained to him that he shouldn't have that kind of stuff," she recalls.
Five years ago, when she was 80 and widowed, she moved in with Ralph and found herself sharing a home with a world-class porn collection. At first she wasn't too happy about that, but gradually she changed her mind.
"It's something he loves," she says. "You see men his age going to bars or on dope. But he's home day and night. That gives me peace of mind. . . . He's not doing anybody any harm, and he's not doing himself any harm."
Her granddaughter feels the same way. "I suppose I could be offended as a woman, but I don't have a problem with pornography," says Amanda Whittington, 28, who works as a portfolio accountant for T. Rowe Price while studying for an MBA at Johns Hopkins. "I think it's a strange little hobby, but I know my dad, and once he starts collecting something, he becomes the quintessential librarian."
People who know Whittington only as a porn collector, she says, are missing the essence of the man.
"He's a very strange combination of completely responsible and totally wacky," she wrote in an e-mail. "I think he can come off a little creepy sometimes to people who don't know him very well, but really he has a heart of gold. We're talking about a man who can spend 45 minutes saying goodbye to my kitties when he comes to visit."
The 'Bingo Boxes'
"When people come here, at least I don't bore them," Whittington says. "They may leave shaking their heads, but they're not bored."
He has arrived at the final stop on the porn tour of his house. He's standing in his bedroom, where much of his archival work is done.
Although the Museum of Sex hauled away more than 75 percent of his collection, Whittington is still putting the finishing touches on the rest of it, and his bedroom is full of boxes not yet complete. The boxes are a curious shape -- about a foot square and two inches deep. They once held bingo cards. His mother brings the boxes home from St. John's Church, where she volunteers on bingo nights.
He pulls one off a bookshelf. It's labeled "Sopornos," and contains a pornographic parody of "The Sopranos." The box also contains "Sopornos" cigars, used to promote the video.
"This is an example of my seriousness as a collector," he says. "It shows how the marketing comes into play."
He refiles the "Sopornos" box among bingo boxes labeled "Lotta Topp" and "Wendy Whoppers" and "Strange Places."
He picks a box off the floor. It's labeled "Chessie Moore No. 3," and it's one of his favorites. He opens it and pulls out a huge white bra that Moore, a semi-famous porn star, autographed for him.
He tells a story: He read that Moore had a "special fan club," and he joined so he could see just how special it was. It turned out that it was very special indeed, so he flew to Florida to meet Moore and then, believe it or not . . . well, actually this is the kind of story that you can't tell in a family newspaper.
"It was just unbelievable!" he says.
...No wonder his wife left him, wow.
