The medium may be different, but the message is the same: Porn sells.

Editor's note: Please be advised that the Web sites mentioned in this story are adult-content sites.

AS THE NEWEST millionaire computer geek from the Eastside, boyish Seth Warshavsky already has a lot to live up to. Depending on who is characterizing him, he's either a genius, a misogynist, a respected global businessman, an exploiter of children, the Bill Gates of porn, or the Larry Flynt of cyberspace. He has been sued by the Pope and Pamela Anderson Lee, caused a riled-up competitor to spit in his face, and was arrested for choking his former girlfriend during a limo ride in Las Vegas (he claims he was trying to keep her from jumping out). He plans to take his fast-rising adult-entertainment Internet company public in April, and last year addressed Congress on issues of sex online (he's for it). His eclectic mix of Net sites offers casino betting, psychic advice, housing loans, and sex-change operations—although, due to complications, he had to postpone last week's online surgery turning a male Florida government worker into a woman named Julie by removing his/her penis (making her one less customer for his Viagra Internet sales site). He hopes to sell art and music over the Net in the future, and when high-speed TV-quality video hits the home computer, he'll begin around-the-world transmission of picture-perfect live sex from Seattle. His intent is to surpass the lower-quality smaller-screen sex acts he already peddles on the Net from Pioneer Square—"free" to paid members—that have helped make him one of the few Internet entrepreneurs of any kind to turn a profit.

But to fully appreciate what the high-school dropout and World Wide Web wunderkind has achieved, and the virtual challenge he poses from his busy office and live-sex emporium at opposite ends of First Avenue, it's helpful to see him for what he inarguably is: the latter-day business descendent of the avenue's historic pornographers—the Second Coming of, say, Roger Forbes.

FROM THE 1970S through the 1990s, Forbes operated a string of Northwest porno theaters, most of them on First and Third avenues in downtown Seattle. (In the '70s, Seattle was home to 11 porn theaters and 14 panoram arcades showing X-rated videos in private booths.) Fearful for their children and weary of looking at the long lines for Debby Does Dallas, church and civic leaders conspired to run Forbes out of town, only to constantly collide with the First Amendment. By the time they came up with workable ordinances, Forbes was infamously celebrated and filthy rich. As the dirty-movie market began its fade—this year, for the first time in modern memory, Seattle does not have a porno movie house—Forbes opportunistically followed the crowds to home video and nude dance clubs. He still sells videos, operates clubs in San Francisco's North Beach, and has a share of the national D骠 Vu nude dance chain. But for the most part, 30 years and hundreds of headlines later, the porn king has relinquished his turf. From his First Avenue condo, Forbes can survey the remains of his former empire: one final nudie joint down the avenue near Pike Street (the Champ Arcade, memorable for its neon sign advertising "Live Girls"). Two blocks up First, the last of Forbes' downtown theaters—the Midtown—was just remodeled and reborn last month as an upscale salon. To the added satisfaction of City Hall, the developer who bought the theater from Forbes is also the wife of Seattle's city attorney.

But the joke may be on Seattle. From Forbes' ashes on First Avenue, the Son of Roger has risen, computer in hand, spreading porn not just down the street but to distant galaxies—and, more to the point, to Seattle living rooms.

"I have met Roger Forbes on occasion," says Seth Warshavsky, dwarfed behind the big desk in his 10th-floor offices, "but I have no sense of his history." Warshavsky, who'll turn 26 in April, wasn't even born when Forbes began blazing the trail that Warshavsky continues down today—literally on the same sidewalks. A block from Forbes' condo and a half-block from Forbes' old Midtown site are Warshavsky's offices and, across First Avenue, his $500,000 condo, from where he surveys the beginnings of his empire: Cybersexland.

Warshavsky's bustling office suite just north of the Pike Place Market serves as global headquarters of the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), which, with just 150 employees, is estimated to have grossed around $75 million in its first three years. At the other end of First, in a Pioneer Square loft above the Pyramid Breweries alehouse, Warshavsky has created the modern-day version of his neighbor Forbes' nudie joints: voyeuristic sex 24 hours a day, with a modern marketing advantage—home delivery on demand.

Amid a jumble of beds, stages, showers, and video cameras, men and women earn $20 an hour in the converted warehouse performing what began as strip dancing in 1996 and now is live sex—alone, with objects, or with each other. On the loft's stages, the 35 technicians, directors, and young performers are locked in dramatic production of masturbation and intercourse—simulated in the sense that there is no apparent ejaculation or penetration. Many of the performers—some of them onetime local nude club dancers and their boyfriends—undress and roll about and semi-bang away for hours on end as directors in a booth guide the joysticks of remote cameras—part of what Warshavsky says is $3 million worth of push-video and state-of-the-art graphics systems. For the online customer, the viewing options include the Dungeon, Two-girl Shower, mano-on-mano Buddy Room, or the Couples Room ("Live couples fucking their brains out"). As the performers writhe, grope, and soap up, the video signal passes from the performance cubicles into a control booth. It is at this point that Warshavsky, and history, part company with Roger Forbes: The product is sent by computers to telephone lines and across the Net to the World Wide Web, into any of the millions of homes with an Internet hookup. There, an impulsive chap on his PC in London or a horny teen logging on from China can join what Warshavsky says are 100,000 fellow members enrolled at $25 a month ($175 a year) to view anonymous sex at IEG's Internet sites, the most popular being Clublove.com. In Warshavsky's new-media jargon, it's called "video conferencing." To old-timers, it's spank-the-monkey time.