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Does an oblong "personal vibrator," available at many drug stores, count as sexually explicit? What about when it is penis-shaped? Questions like these are occupying the minds of managers of New York City sex shops, who are scrambling to save their businesses as cops have begun raiding and padlocking businesses under an anti-sex zoning law that's the harshest of any big US city.

The zoning law passed the City Council in October 1995, as the cornerstone of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's campaign to rectify New York's "quality of life." For nearly three years, civil liberties groups and sex-business proprietors battled in the courts against the vaguely-worded statute, which prohibits sex-related businesses in almost every part of the city. But state and federal judges have upheld the law at every turn. Triple-X customers, workers, and owners have left in their quiver only a long-shot appeal to the US Supreme Court.

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With the city feeling itself on firm legal footing, on July 22 police and building inspectors began to enforce the ordinance. Three weeks later, the city had shut six businesses in raids elaborately staged for the media. Many other stores and clubs closed themselves to avoid shutdown.

Flush with success, the city is now angling to expand the law's reach to potentially any businesss-- such as gay bookstores-- dealing in erotic material.

Under the ordinance, business with "substantial proportion" of their stock or activity that is sexually explicit are banned from 98 percent of the city. In the remaining two percent-- mostly industrial districts with little pedestrian traffic-- no porn shop, stripper club, or topless bar can exist within 500 feet of a school, a "house of worship," or one another.

Some of the 144 remaining businesses threatened by the law have had plans to stay where they are by reducing their dealings in sexually explicit material below a "substantial proportion," which the city had previously defined as 40 percent.

The 40-percent rule seemed etched in judicial stone by the court opinions upholding the zoning law. But now the city contends that inspectors can decide themselves, case-by-case, the "substantial proportion" needed to trigger a shutdown. On August 10, a New York State judge agreed, saying that the magic proportion could be gauged based on "common sense," a store's revenues, or even the intentions of its customers.

One porn shop in Chelsea, a gay section of Manhattan, hopes to survive under the new law by paring down its stock, starting with penis-shaped dildos. "Our video selection has dwindled considerably," the manager says. "We had to send back large amount of our specialty fetish material. What we're keeping on the shelves are constant sellers-- the Falcon, the Kristen Bjorn, the Bel Ami. We got rid of the majority of our black videos, Asian and Latin videos, our leather, spanking, and foot fetish wrestling." To dilute their offerings, the store now sells a range of cheap new and used videos, mostly mainstream Hollywood fare.

Whether this strategy will work is anyone's guess. It will be the focus for a new round of court battles. What's certain is that as Mayor Giuliani pursues his vendetta against sex businesses, the city will use every trick in the book.