In That Adult Bookstore Just Outside Town Declan Heyse really nails the atmosphere of the adult bookstores and film/video peepstores that got relegated to rural byways via commercial urban zoning laws in the early 1980s:
First, you drove past the mills and then through the woods on that winding county road, which was of course bumpy because the county took care of it. Next, you turned onto that numbered state route, which was in an even worse repair because the state took care of it. Dodge the potholes for a few minutes, though, and there it was. A building like some cross between a house and a shack and a bar you wouldn’t go in even with all of your friends at your back, and sitting all by its lonesome in the center of a gravel parking lot/moat of potential obscenity lawsuits and rebukes of eternal damnation.
…
Like I mentioned, this was the early 1980s. The very early 1980s. There were no bright and cheerful Pleasure Chests back then, no friendly and welcoming Good Vibrations. You went through that front door with a rusty spring snapping it back shut (loudly) like something on your Grandpa’s work shed, and you saw that crappy fake-wood paneling your friend’s scary dad had put up in his “rec room,” and you spotted that cashier who reminded you there were parts of Pennsylvania even more rural than where you lived, and you started to rethink the Adult Bookstore.
I came along a little later and had a little less freedom than Declan; although I often saw the kind of places he describes and once or twice experienced the ambience he describes so well, it wasn’t until 1991 that I walked alone into a really fine San Francisco magazine shop where I could have this experience:
Then I saw the wall of those other things.
An entire fucking wall.
Mistresses. Dominatrices. Men on their knees and in collars. Women bound and gagged. Slaves abused and dominated. Leather. Boots. Leather boots. One cover photo after another, and only partially obscured by the metal magazine holders themselves.
It was like the heavens parted, and the sun shone down on the promised land.
By this point in my life, I already knew that I wasn’t “the norm” sexually. And I was at least aware of most of what I would eventually make my peace with as “kinks,” even if I still fought the idea they were somehow actually “perversions.” And while I knew there were others like me, it had always felt like we were very few and very far between. So few and far between, in fact, that in those pre-Internet days, we would probably never meet as friends who could tell each other we each weren’t as weird as we thought, and that I would probably never find one of the exceedingly rare women who might actually be into this. We were needles in an America-wide haystack. But the wall changed all that.
Because it was an entire fucking wall.
The creepy cashier pretending not to be watching me over top of that swinger’s paper no longer creeped me out after that. Because even at that age, I knew enough about writing and publishing to know that nobody published an entire fucking wall of these magazines without a market. And even if that market were small by mainstream standards, it was a lot bigger than I’d been imagining up to that point. I felt a part of something larger, standing there, even if I didn’t know exactly what that might be. But it didn’t matter. Because while I still might be just as alone in these, ah, “proclivities” in my hometown as I’d thought, I wasn’t quite as alone in them overall as I’d been before I walked through that ratty door with its rusty spring.
I bought a Swedish nudes magazine to show my friends, but I also bought three BDSM magazines that day…
