Elf Sternberg

It's realy weird to think how far we've come. In a conversation about buying sex toys, I mentioned just how hard it was to buy my first sex toy years ago. A woman who said, "Wait, I'm 29. Why was it hard to buy a sex toy the year I was born?"

This is what I told her:

You really have to internalize the idea that "the past is another country." 1986 was the first year the US Government acknowledged that gay men had been dying of AIDS for six years already. Although HIV had already been discovered, nobody knew where it came from or its transmission vector. There was no Internet at all; everything you knew about the world came to you through newspapers and television stations owned by large corporations. The television stations were more strongly regulated by the government regarding what they could say, and so blatant lying was out (FOX news would never have survived) but telling only one side of a story was very do-able. On the one hand, Playboy, Penthouse and Forum magazine were slowly making their push into the mental territory of America; on the other hand, all the media you had available to you were full of stories about how one night of sex with the wrong person will kill you and watching hardcore porn is a sure step to ruin. In 1986, it was still illegal to act gay. Just buying bondage equipment was used in several cases to prosecute people for intent to commit assault.

This isn't some wacky preacher or billboard. This is everything. This is every news channel, every newspaper, every magazine-- and there was no internet to call bullshit on any of it. There was no way to buy toys on-line. There was no on-line.

The only place to buy sex toys were these hole-in-the wall places, often in strip malls in the most depressed neighborhoods and so run down they had no choice but to lease store space to the skeeviest businesses imaginable: pawn shops, convenience stores that specialized in alcohols for homeless people, and sex stores. You had to drive there, and then enter the store.

The store was typically painted in the ugliest yellow-beige. And while behind the broad counter the guy running the store might pointedly ignore you while reading something distinctly non-porny, the other patrons were usually men desperate to not be seen in a store like that. In a store where death and ruin waited, and only a twisted and evil interpretation of the First Amendment stopped the cops from shutting it down. Three of the four walls were dedicated to magazines, and the fringe guys reading bondage magazines or gay magazines really didn't want to be seen. Eye contact was absolutely forbidden. Often, these stores were part of a small public theater (or worse, individual booths) where really ancient porn movies were being shown, and desperately lonely men went to masturbate, so the air in the store smelled like a mixture of semen and hospital disinfectant.

Off the one wall racked with toys, you had to pull one off, and then have a face-to-face transaction with the guy across the counter to buy it. Meanwhile, all the other guys are watching what you just did, and judging you.

Then you had to go back out, and hope that a cop wasn't sitting in the parking lot photographing your license plate. If he was, you (or if you were married, your wife) might get a letter warning you for "visiting a known location for prostitution and pornography."

You had to be really, really fuckin' horny for that toy to buy it.