NEW YORK -- Ron comes to the city about twice a month from Maryland. He likes to go to the same topless bar downtown after dinner to unwind a little, he says, or less frequently, to a peep show on Eighth Avenue on his way back to his hotel.
Part of the ritual is curiosity, he said. Another part is that he feels a little more daring in New York than when he's at home.
"Nothing wrong with it, and I think it's my own business," said Ron, a 43-year-old lawyer who declined to give his last name.
"This is America ... This is New York."
But those sex-related, adult establishments that make him feel daring have become the business of community groups, politicians and business organizations who see them as nothing more than a blight on the city.
They say they hurt property value and encourage crime.
Their opponents sound a lot like Ron: This is New York. This is America. This is no place for censorship; that's unconstitutional.
"This is so much more of a cosmopolitan area, and there is no common morality," said Richard Kunis, owner of a Manhattan store that sells and rents X-rated movies.
"There is common respect. What one person finds entertaining, others find offensive, but these are just words and pictures, and who is it for the government to come in and say that you can't watch something you find entertaining. New York has always been a censorship-free city."
If Mr. Kunis blames the government, it is because the leading crusader in this war on sex stores is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who got elected last year on the promise to tackle problems he lumped together as "quality of life issues."
In the past 11 months, Mr. Giuliani's quality of life evangelism has meant running the squeegee men out of the Bowery, throwing panhandlers off the subway and flooding Greenwich Village with cops on weekends night to make sure drunken kids don't urinate into basement apartments or play their radios too ,, loud.
The mayor's effort has gained him widespread praise.
Now he has turned to sex shops. He wants them out.
But, Mr. Kunis objects, "What about the quality of sex lives. That's part of life too."
Mr. Giuliani has proposed restricting all the bars and stores and theaters that offer sexually oriented entertainment to industrial areas of the city, distancing them from residential
neighborhoods and commercial districts. So far, the proposal includes no grandfather clause that would allow established stores to stay. And while the staff of the City Planning Department is busy developing guidelines for the new zoning proposals, the City Council has passed a moratorium that prohibits any of those sex-related business from opening or expanding in the city for an entire year. The prohibition is absolute.
The whole idea has angered many sex shop operators, their customers and some civil libertarians. Already, the New York Civil Liberties Union is poised to file a lawsuit.
Norman Siegel, executive director of the group, said the moratorium is "constitutionally flawed and very repressive."
Mr. Kunis is dismissive of the quality of life argument and cast his business as a boon to family values.
"I run a family business in which I cater to the mom and pop part of the family," he said. "Philosophically, I have to say that we serve married people, committed people who want to be titillated."
While the city cannot restrict access to the sex shops, it can regulate them. They can, for example, be closed if the businesses are having an adverse effect on the surrounding community -- the crime rate and the property values being the two most critical indicators.
Gretchen Dykstra, president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, countered that her organization has evidence that along the 10 blocks of Eighth Avenue with the highest concentration of adult establishments, crime rates are higher and property value lower than others in the neighborhood.
Ms. Dykstra praised the part of the proposed new regulations that would bar adult establishments from operating within 500 feet of each other.
"That is the thing that is really harmful -- the sheer number and the sheer concentration," she said. "So wherever these businesses end up, you will not have that harmful concentration."
Much of the impetus for the proposal came from the Times Square officials, who are involved in a desperate effort to return the famed district to its storied past as center of the theater world, rather than the mecca for "adult entertainment."
But it was neighborhood anger across the city that may have finally fired the debate.
With the proliferation of video-rentals in the last decade, X-rated video stores have popped up in places where topless bars or peep shows had never been. That moved the sex-related businesses into neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, areas that used to regard themselves as protected from the seedier aspects of the sex stores of the city. Ironically, with the proposal to move the shops into industrial areas, many of those neighborhoods could end up with sex shops closer than before.