Clinton, Md. — 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,” which is labeled “Shot Live at a Filthy Whorehouse in Tijuana!” There’s an old copy of a magazine called — well, actually you can’t print its name in a family newspaper.
“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, and on top of the wooden dinner table 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.
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.
“It got to the point where he had too much,” she says. “He couldn’t keep it clean.”
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. 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.
He learned how to organize, catalog 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 — but not porn. Apparently, it was up to him to preserve America’s X-rated 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.”
TO EACH HIS OWN
“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 cataloged 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 daughter. 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 made a short movie on Whittington titled “King of Porn.” Soon, he was featured in Spin magazine — which dubbed him the “Librarian of Sexual Congress” — and on the Comedy Central network’s “Daily Show.”
“I wish you could have seen his house before we took all the stuff away,” says Grady Turner, executive curator of the Museum of Sex. “The place was packed to the rafters — literally.”
A museum-world veteran, Turner’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 because it was getting too big for his house. Turner traveled to Clinton to check out the collection and was 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.
“This is a collection you could not make now,” Turner says. “It will be a primary source for historical research and a great repository of pop culture.”
MAKING AN IMPRESSION
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 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,” Turner says, “and people start unloading boxes marked ‘Gangbang’ and ‘Obese’ and ‘Ginger Lynn,’ you draw a crowd.”
Five years ago, when May Whittington 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. “I think it’s a strange little hobby, but I know my dad, and once he starts collecting something, he becomes the quintessential librarian.”
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.
He picks one 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.
