A booth in which to masturbate

(Friday, June 12, 1998)


One of the strangest things about adult bookstores, particularly ones on the edges of towns, is the concept of a video booth. Here, individuals can enter a semi-private stall to watch dirty movies for $.25 a minute while jerking off.

 Even as a clerk at a porn store who understands how much money these booths bring in, this concept seems strange to me. Don’t get me wrong. When I was a teenager, I masturbated all the time and having a socially acceptable place to do it in public would have seemed like heaven when I was 14. By the time I was 18, I’d learned to use more restraint and the idea of watching dirty movies alongside 8 other guys with nothing but black-painted particleboard between us seems… yucky.

 As the overnight clerk, one of my main responsibilities is to clean the video booths once a shift. It sounds grosser than it is. I have thick, rubber gloves that go up to my armpits and spray the walls liberally with ammonia before scrubbing them down. Other than that, it’s just mopping the floor that happened to be covered in cum. But still, this is the only real work the job requires me to do and this particular part is over in less than a half-hour. When I talk to friends who spend long hours in hot kitchens, waiting tables or working on assembly lines, even with the jizz mopping, this job seems pretty sweet.

 (Editor’s note: To this day, the smell of ammonia brings me back to sitting in a fluorescent dump in the middle of the night, waiting for 6 a.m. to roll around.)

 As you might expect (or maybe not, I expect most people’s minds don’t work this way), one of the biggest problems of having video booths is that some men will use the location to attempt to have sex with other random men. This is Mankato, which doesn’t have a gay bar or any other gay locale other than the college SAGE organization for gay and transgender students and their supporters. Unfortunately, because of the lack of a better option, some people use the video booths for random ‘romantic’ interludes. I’m responsible for paying attention to the security camera screen that broadcasts what was going on in the hallway of the video booth room. Some of the regular “patrons” discovered that there was a video camera in the hallway and in an attempt cheat the system, try to sneak to the booths next to them by sliding on the semen-covered floor.

Because of this, I have to constantly be listening for the sound of clothing sliding across linoleum, louder than normal grunts or the clang of a belt buckle hitting the floor. I’ll admit it. When I first started, it was a rush to run in with a huge mag-lite and catch a guy on all fours trying to jerk off the guy in the booth next to him. Patrons caught in this position seem to fly straight up into the air when the light hits them, despite being on all fours, like a cat being tossed into a boiling hot bathtub. I’ve also seen guys damn-near knock themselves out when they realized they were busted, stood up quickly and ran face-first into solid plywood.

 Very funny, but also pretty sad. I try really hard to think that the guys I catch aren’t sexual deviants, that they’re just lonely and this is the only way they feel they can act on their sexuality. But deep in my heart I know that the Gay 90s is only a 90-minute drive away and that if they really wanted a meaningful relationship, they wouldn’t be searching for it the back of a store that sells 10 different styles of nipple rings. 

A friend joked about how funny it would be if I went to check on the booths, only to have a 350-pound gorilla of a man come out and beat the crap out of me. I fail to see the humor in this, but it did make me pay closer attention to who was going in and out of the booths.

Knowing this insider information, you may ask why a business owner would put up with this kind of activity at their store. It’s a simple matter of money. On a slow week, the booths bring in $1,000 a week.

This means that the whole video booth computer system paid for itself in less than a year! (Yes, the whole thing is run by a computer hooked into the VCRs.) Additionally, the movies played on the 30 available channels are movies that come directly from the store’s stock, so there’s no need to buy movies extra moves for the booths. The manager just needs to look at the weekly view report, find which movies were most popular and stock up the rest of the channels with similar movies.

I was honestly surprised to learn how many “genres” of porn exist. For the booths, channels one through ten are 6-hour heterosexual scene compilation tapes. These are great because they take longer to play through, there’s less rewind and replay cycles, and the VCRs don’t need to be restarted as often as the ones playing shorter tapes. Channels 11 through 15 are always lesbian videos and always the least popular channels. The store manager is able to choose what to play on channels 16 through 19, which means they were usually the strangest fetish tapes he could find in the store’s selection of videos. While we originally put them on as a joke, the report showed that videos like Ragtime (women having sex during their monthly period), the World of Denni-O (videos of extremely large dildo penetration) and any number of bondage videos were very popular and making us the most money after the gay videos. Finally, channels 20 through 30 are gay and also always the most popular (the look I received from Bill when I asked why more channels weren’t gay discouraged me asking this question again.)

 This does bring up the point of copyright control. Most adult movies have the standard FBI warning we’ve all seen that explains this video is for personal use only and that you cannot charge people to watch it. Charging people $.25 a minute to watch porn in a video booth is in direct violation of this law, but I have yet to hear of an adult video company cracking down on adult bookstores for engaging in this practice. Maybe the video companies don’t care about this copyright violation, I expect they know it’s happening all over the place, but I don’t expect them to make an effort to enforce their rights anytime soon. What a great business to get into when you can (albeit illegally) make money from someone else’s “hard” work?

 I can’t imagine what kind of cash a larger store like Sexworld in Minneapolis brings in with their video booths. Then again, I expect downtown Minneapolis’ warehouse district provides a lot more colorful clientele than the porn store on the edge of a college town.

 It never ceases to amaze me what people will pay money to do.