Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the November/December 1978 Issue
Outside a farmer in bib overalls and straw hawks tomatoes and onions from the back of a pickup truck on a Saturday afternoon. Three yards away, a neon arrow beckons shoppers to more exotic merchandise.
Two decades ago, the building in Roanoke’s City Market housed a grocery store, whose glass show windows lured passers-by with fresh produce and specials of the week. Now the glass façade is completely covered with light blue paint and white letters that shout “Adult Books – Magazines – Movies!” It is one of Roanoke’s half dozen purveyors of hardcore pornography. Inside, a pop-eyed, balding sixtyish man in an Arnold Palmer sport shirt and paisley Bermuda shorts listlessly watches a pro football game on a portable TV while collecting money from customers for magazines, tabloid newspapers, paperback books and eight mm. films – all graphically celebrating copulation in its many varied forms. His customers are not entirely the raincoated dirty old men of long-held myth. Not anymore. They may be wearing three-piece business suits or jogging outfits, depending on the location, time of day and day of the week.
The market for pornographic materials, experts agree, is not confined to perverts or emotional cripples. Magazines such as Playboy combined intellectualism with bare breasts in the early 1960’s, and gave raciness a certain highbrow patina. Movies like Deep Throat, a hardcore fluke success, and Last Tango in Paris, which had them lining up five years ago at the Terrace Theatre, even created a kind of “porn chic.”
In Roanoke, as in just about any American city, pornography exists because there are people willing to pay big bucks for it. The nation’s pornographers, according to a recent survey by the California Department of Justice, do a solid $4 billion a year business – about as much as the conventional motion picture and recording industries combined. Granted, sales of such arguable publications as Playboy and Playgirl are lumped in with this figure, but the biggest share comes from the thousands of adult bookstores across the country, a handful of which are located in Roanoke. Two are packed into the former Kroger Market building and an adjacent structure on the City Market. The others are located on Williamson Road, usually within walking distance of that street’s massage parlors.
The proliferation of the “rub dens,” as they are called in the trade, aroused the ire of Roanoke’s former vice mayor, Elizabeth Bowles, before she was elected to Roanoke City Council. A businesswoman in the Williamson Road area, she was instrumental two years ago in a push to regulate the massage parlors dotting that section. That effort eventually resulted in drastically reducing their number there.
“I’ve talked to our commonwealth’s attorney about the bookstores, but I’m told this is an entirely different type of thing and prosecution is enormously more difficult,” she admits.
Mayor Noel Taylor, a Baptist minister, says he feels pornography is a problem wherever it is located: “As a mayor and a minister, this is my position.”
Taylor says Council has expressed concern over the presence of such blatant porn in Roanoke, “but if they (bookstores) are operating within the framework of the law, you can pass disapproving resolutions, but you cannot take any action until a specific law is broken.”
The inside of a porno bookstore can be disconcerting for the uninitiated. The stark interior with its racks and tables of books and magazines, its bare painted walls, its bare wood or linoleum floors, resembles a flea market.
The interiors of most porn shops fall into a pattern: a large center table of slick, full-color magazines in sealed plastic wrappers; tiered wall racks offering more magazines, tabloids, ribald cartoon and joke books and paperbacks.
Although the magazines are sealed in plastic, the covers offer blatant illustration of what is inside. Bearing such titles as Foolish Virgins and Weird Couples, and Hot and Wet, they feature one couple or two, or occasionally two or three women only. Some have an inane commentary sandwiched in here and there to accompany the pictures.
Sample plot in Hot and Wet: Sexy large-chested Yvette’s husband has gone out to play golf, so she (bored) decides to take a nude sunbath beside the pool. Next-door neighbor Phil, who’s been trimming the hedge, comes over to join her, and in no time flat the two of them are frolicking poolside sans clothing. Who should show up next but Yvette’s sexy, large-chested chum, Vickie. Nothing if not cooperative, Vickie soon joins in the fun and the three of them get progressively more athletic and inventive until the unexpected return of Yvette’s husband. After a paragraph of obligatory hemming and hawing from the guilty three, the husband decides there’s a good time to be had with what’s left of the afternoon, and our four playmates continue with their outdoor recreation.
Hot and Wet is 34 pages long and costs $6. Like the other pornographic material in the bookstore, it includes a disclaimer to the effect that it is intended as an educational text, a supplement published for the further sexual fulfillment and edification of married couples. The wording varies but the message, for legal reasons, remains the same.
Also stated is the fact that the magazine’s sale is forbidden to minors.
“I guess if a mature person wants this sort of thing, it’s all right,” comments Elizabeth Bowles, “ but I’ve seen a couple of cases where some young boys were standing outside the stores and older men have gone in and gotten the merchandise for them. Young people don’t have the proper judgement to handle this kind of emotion.”
Mrs. Bowles says she feels strongly that a share of rape cases have their origins in youths turned on by pornographic literature.
The magazines on the center table in the bookstores are apparently the good stuff. These magazines have a cover price of $5 or $6 and are sold at full price, but the majority of those on the wall racks carry store discounted prices of $2 or $3.
The tabloids continue in the same order. They sell for $1 or $2 and like the magazines contain explicit shots of intercourse and sport such titles as Hot Stuff and In and Out. One has to admire the no-nonsense, up-front title on one newsprint publication: “Big Boobs and Derrieres.” Clearly now, the customer knows exactly what he’s getting, and the 18-page tabloid does not disappoint in this department.
Paperbacks, with provocative line drawings on the cover, are priced at $1.50, although there are occasional discounts (“Buy three, get one FREE!). They have titles like The Crowd in the bedroom and The Insatiable Typist. The full color cover of Lacerated Lovers promises “A new and up-to-date documentary of obsessed females seeking maddening fulfillment through domination, torture and pain”
Materials appealing to the sado-masochistic devotees are readily available in Roanoke. One tabloid is called Tied Up and Spanked, featuring page after page of shackled, harnessed, gagged or otherwise abused women.
Sexual accouterments, called toys by those who use them frequently, are available in limited supply here. In addition to a wide array of dildos, Playmate Dolls are also for sale. These life-size inflatable companions sell for around $30, and each bodily orifice, is “anatomically correct.” They are marketed under the names of “Miss Playmate” and Miss Wonderful” and are presumably geared to men who have more than average difficulty finding real live dates.
“Miss Playmate” and “Miss Wonderful” pale in comparison to their sister, “Ms. Bazooma, “ whose bust measures a formidable 48 inches. Obviously for the more adventuresome, Ms. Bazooma is a popular lady, and the one Roanoke adult bookstore that stocked her is currently sold out.
It is, however, the movies which go the farthest in making the adult bookstores the moneymakers they are.
Beyond the main room of each adult bookstore is a dark maze of tiny booths, about the size of a broom closet. There lie the peep shows. Each booth offers a 16 minute loop of eight mm. pornographic film which the customer views in two-minute segments, as he pumps quarter after quarter into a slot. The booth features a bench opposite the door (to which is afixed the two-by-two foot screen) and a projector protruding through the wall facing the screen.
A door leads customers into the maze, topped by a sign proclaiming , “Positively No Loitering In Back Rooms. Anyone Reported Annoying Other Customers Will Be Asked To Leave Permanently. Only 1 Person To A Booth.”
Beside the door are racks of illustrated boxes the films on view came in. Each has a still from the movie on the front and a synopsis of the plot on the back. Beneath the box is the number of the booth in which this particular film can be seen.
The films feature generally good looking young people. As with the magazine, the “actors” are usually one couple, two couples or two to three women. The films are either silent or have English subtitles. The descriptions on the back of the film boxes are usually in French or German.
A current peep show porn star/starlet is a black transexual who boasts the cleavage of Raquel Welch and the genitalia of a man. This performer’s likeness is also available on a poster in several Roanoke stores.
It takes $2 in quarters to view one movie in its entirety. Since the movie is less than 10 minutes long, a healthy turnover can be anticipated on a popular film. It is not unheard of for one booth to generate $100 on a good day, and most stores have 15 booths. Attendants empty the quarters into aluminum milk cans.
Movies featuring men only and designed to appeal to homosexuals are no longer available in Roanoke. A police crack-down on adult bookstores a couple of years ago caused management to clean up their act a bit, and the gay movies were removed. There is a plethora of gay print pornography available, however, in one section of the main room. Gay magazines and newspapers sell at slightly higher prices than the heterosexual variety.
Also noticeably absent is anything, gay or straight, featuring children. There is a tabloid called “Teenage Sex,” but its participants, while not yet in their middle years certainly, have obviously reached the age of consent.
“As far as I know, there was never much in the way of kiddie porn around here,” says Don, a former adult store employee. “I guess it was always considered too risky.”
The atmosphere in a porno bookstore is more covert than erotic. Although the clientele includes respectable business people browsing during their lunch hour, the bulk of porno store customers tend to be gray, faceless men in work pants and plaid sport shirts, mainly in their forties and fifties. Not a word is spoken in the red-lighted tiny rear hallways. Customers avoid each other’s gaze as they pass, seeking out their chosen movie.
Trouble is almost non-existent, and Roanoke Police say the bookstores themselves are responsible disruption on the City Market beat.
Even Mrs. Bowles admits the bookstores generate no noticeable trouble.
“My Business is close to the Williamson Road stores, and I see masses of men going in there,” she says. “But they don’t seem to create the problem in the neighborhood that the massage parlors did. They don’t make any problem, so there’s really no outcry among commercial and residential neighbors.”
Still, she thinks, the bookstores and related establishments attract “an element” condusive to crime.
The customers are there to browse, make their purchases or watch the movies. The bookstores are no place to pick up women, because few women frequent them. Pick-up action may be available out in the streets, but not in the stores themselves.
A certain amount of homosexual wooing was done in the movie booth area when two or three gay movies were shown along with the straight fare. There is still a gay clientele in the stores because of the large volume of homosexually-oriented print material, however, and male gays will often watch a straight movie, usually featuring a woman and two men.
“They don’t bother me none” M.B. Johnston, a truck farmer who sells vegetables and home canned goods on the market, says of the bookstores. “I don’t pay no attention to those places.”
Johnston says he has no interest in the bookstores, doesn’t really know what’s inside them, and has no curiosity to find out.
“I wouldn’t say it bothers me, exactly, having them there,” says Mimi Gwaltney of her racy neighbors across the street. Ms. Gwaltney is an owner of the Harmony Café, a vegetarian restaurant which moved to the market several months ago from First Street. “I’ll be glad when they’re gone though.”
Sherwin Jacobs, owner of Lock, Stock, and Barrel in Tanglewood Mall, has bought the old Kroger building where one of the stores is located, and plans to renovate the structure into business and office space next year. The adult bookstore located in Jacobs’ building is expected to move when the present lease expires this spring. At that time, Jacobs says, he suspects the bookstore will consolidate with its neighbor since both are owned by the same people.
Adult bookstores are not the only places where pornography is available in Roanoke. The once-proud Lee Theatre on Williamson Road now shows X-rated double-bills exclusively. The movies are longer, certainly, than the adult store booth-movies, not quite as purple, and often make a stronger attempt at plot, performance and photography. Aside from this, the approach is generally the same, although occasionally the bigger-budget X movie will try for the humorous or even satiric, something totally alien to the booth-movies. A recent headliner at the Lee was The Erotic Adventures of Pinnochio, a variation on the children’s fable, featuring lots of naked bodies and a twist on the original. The ad tagline for this one was “It’s not his NOSE that Grows!” The film was given a pictoral review in a past issue of Playboy.
Lee customers are usually older men, with an occasional assemblage of rowdy wild and crazy college guys.
Some of the same hardcore magazines, newspapers and novels sold at the adult bookstores are also available at such respectable retail outlets as Milan Brothers, the venerable tobacco shop on Jefferson Street, and Printers Ink, a bookstore/news stand farther up Jefferson and in Southwest Plaza.
Milan Brothers’ adult magazines are in plastic covers, but their adult paperback selection rivals the City Market stores, and copies of Agony and Ecstasy: The Newspaper of Pain and Pleasure, a tabloid clearly aimed at the “beat-me, beat-me” crowd, are readily available.
In Printers Ink, Swingers’ Annual is sold about three feet from the Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post. This publication is a compilation of thousands of classified ads from individuals and couples (Southwestern Virginia is represented) seeking sexual partners. They are usually (almost always) accompanied by the seeker’s photograph, displaying full frontal nudity. A random sampling:
W/F, 36, endwed, wants swinging
times with cple or guys 25-45.
Likes toys and leather.
(This 36-year-old white female seeks a good time with either a cooperative man and wife or a few men. She likes her sex accompanied by the paraphernalia mentioned elsewhere. And she is turned on by men who wear leather garments while having sex).
Or:
A COUPLE FOR!!!!
GDLKG m(42)w(37) wants het couple
or bi-gals/guys for good sex times, lite
B&D. No drugs, fatties.
(this takes a bit of explaining. This is a married couple, in all likelihood. The man is 42 years old, the wife 37, and they advertise the opinion that they are a nice-looking pair. They want a straight couple or men and/or women who are bisexual for good old fashioned coupling, in whatever variation. They don’t mind if you like to get a little rough at times – a slap here, a harsh word there – to heighten the sexual fun. B&D stands for Bondage and Discipline. At some point, one partner will influence his will over the other, and make him/her do his/her bidding. This particular couple does NOT want to bother with those who use drugs. And they are esthetic; they want no responses from the grossly overweight.)
Swinger’s Annual is a browsable item at Printers Ink, since it is encased in sealed plastic.
There are those who ask why a harder line is not taken by law enforcement agencies and government officials against the more flagrant examples of hardcore pornography. For all the attention paid to the area of porno legislation, however, the laws are still fuzzy and difficult to pin down.
In 1957, The U.S Supreme Court ruled that sexual content alone was not enough to distinguish obscenity, that the material must “appeal to prurient interests.” Nine years later, another decision by the Supreme Court went further. Now the material must be utterly devoid of “redeeming social values.”
A more recent and conservative decision by the Court further complicated the issue by indicating that anything offensive to “community standards” could constitute pornography, leaving its purveyors open to arrest.
The Supreme Court has said very definitely you can’t arbitrarily ban the stuff because of the right of free speech,” comments General Assembly Delegate Raymond Robrecht, who briefly chaired a legislative study committee on pornography. “But it has gotten totally out of hand. The people who were so concerned about guaranteeing the safety of literature like Ulysses and Desire Under the Elms are now finding themselves confronted by live sex shows on stage.”
Crack-downs on pornography would be more prevalent, legislators agree, were these cases not so prone to bog down completely over such issues as free expression and the determination of community standards.
Virginia is further hampered because its laws dealing with pornography are scattered throughout state statutes. Robrecht hoped that his study committee could collect all obscenity legislation into one entity. The committee met once in late October, decided their existence was extraneous in view of the large number of current laws already on the books, and after one hour voted to disband.
Robrecht is, however, one of the patrons of a state bill to require conventional bookstores and news stands to segregate “skin magazines” from more regular fare. Many stores, particularly national drug store chains, already do this.
If there are any organized local groups combatting print pornographic materials, Council members and clergymen are unaware of them.
Roanoke is not Porn City, by any means, but its number of porn shops is comparable to Richmond and Norfolk, cities of greater populations, and what is available there, is available here.
But even smut-fighthing Elizabeth Bowles seems almost resigned to peaceful co-existence with the adult existence with the adult bookstores. “They’re here, and their probably not going anyplace,” she concedes.
And if the adult bookstore owners are on top of the market, Ms. Bazooma will soon be re-stocked, just in time for the Christmas trade.
The perfect gift for the man who has nothing.
Originally published in the November, 1978 issue of The Roanoker
