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Meet Ralph Whittington, who amassed one of the largest private collections of pornography ever. His collection can now be seen and studied at the Museum of Sex in New York City.
'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.
"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."
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