Tour Focuses on Scandalous Lives of the Founding Fathers

It’s easy to view historical figures in an almost saintly light. Immortalized in dignified painted portraits, one tends to forget that these were people, real people with real lives as colorful and interesting as our own. One doesn’t think often of George Washington’s sex life, for instance. And yet, a new tour in Philadelphia is exposing the public to the more salacious details of the founding fathers’ lives for the very first time.

The tour is called “Sex and the (First) City,” and it is led by former criminal lawyer David Cross. Mild-mannered and a little nerdy-looking in his bow tie and khakis, Cross nonetheless has created a vivid reconstruction of the private lives of some of America’s most prominent statesmen.

Did you know, for instance, that Benjamin Franklin was a great frequenter of ladies of the night? Or that General (and first President) George Washington was on an endless quest for aphrodisiacs, which included the infamous Spanish Fly? Thomas Jefferson was known as a ladies’ man, cutting a swath through the more adventuresome women of the City of Brotherly Love. And good old Alexander Hamilton, now the star of an award-winning Broadway musical, was having an affair with the married Maria Reynolds at his Walnut Street home while simultaneously blackmailing her husband, James.

The tour is held in the early evenings, at 7 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, in Old City. The sordid details are described vaguely enough that it’s safe for families with older children. The Daily News made note of Cross’s delicate, deliberately vague phrasing, which includes gems like “certain gesticulations,” “the act,” “love’s disport,” and “Cyprian mysteries.” It’s nothing, a guest commented, that a kid wouldn’t hear on cable.

To book a tour, go to: sexandthefirstcity.com.