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I don't think many use condoms . Most stop to chat with Kalamets, who is shivering in her peacoat (the bookstore has no heat, and on the day that I visit, the owner is looking at installing gas lines which the building has lacked since it was built), but she still manages to banter back and forth over the counter to the men as she doles out handfuls of tokens for the video booths upstairs; each one granting them a few more minutes of pornography on the booths’ small screens.

When he heads into the theater, Kalamets says he’s been coming to the bookstore quite often since his wife passed, and both of his parents are dead.

Visiting an adult bookstore is perfectly legal, but socially it can be risky, particularly in McKeesport, which, like Pittsburgh, is technically a city but often functions as a very large small town where everyone seems to know your business.

gay video booths

He talks in quiet tones as rock music blares from a portable stereo. April 14, 1972.

  • Bean, Donald L., and John P. Coyne. I'd say it's a dangerous place, probably a breeding ground for HIV."

    A police officer stops by and says a man tried to abduct a 4-year-old child up the road about 45 minutes earlier. “Couples will come in and spend two, three, four, five, six hundred dollars in a night,” Kalamets says.

    Her work in sex and death, however, are in some ways about the same thing: intention, vulnerability, and care. Her goal is not respectability or gentrification, she says, but respect and pleasure, privacy and autonomy, a refusal of shame.

    Dade Lemanski lives in Wilkinsburg. But when customers started scrawling on the booths with pens and markers to coordinate hookups, ask questions, name their desires, and exchange numbers, Kalamets installed a whiteboard at the top of the stairs, and it gets plenty of use.

    Next, Kalamets tells me, she hopes to cover a whole section of the hallway upstairs in chalkboard paint so that customers can write “all over, whatever they want.”

    As we speak, business remains steady, even in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

    The trees in front of the shop had grown so large and dense that the bookstore wasn’t visible from the road, and business was slow, especially for the arcade in the back, a series of hallways connecting video booths where customers drop tokens in a slot to watch pornography on a small recessed screen. Then again, the men’s hurried pace may simply reflect a wish to get out of the bitter, snapping cold.

    In 2014, the strip club Saints and Sinners planned to open in downtown McKeesport by Valentine’s Day, but wasfaced with heavy protests; the building burned down in early 2015, and a cause was never found.

    May 6, 1969.

  • Coyne, John P., and Mary John Woge. We also have a small theater playing 3 movies at one time! Both she and McCaleb independently express grief over customers claiming that clerks at other adult bookstores have made them feel ashamed and unwelcome. An occasional car pulls over. It makes you have a bad outlook on life. Many other back rooms and adult cinemas closed in early 2020 and don’t seem likely to reopen, while increased police presence and digital surveillance has made public cruising venues more risky and less well-trafficked.

    Grayson McCaleb, regional manager for Modern Adult LLC and manager of the Erie store, got into the adult retail industry by accident after working as a hairdresser.

    Additional information coming soon.

    Resources

    • “2 Book Store Owners Indicted.” Plain Dealer. Happy Hour save $2.00 on all tickets. He has pale skin and thin black hair that comes to a sharp V above his forehead. "

      Wayne Wurzer, Times South bureau

      Southscape, a periodic feature in the South edition of The Times, is intended to give you some glimpses of life in South King County - probably the kinds of things that don't normally make the news pages.

    • All Adult Books, an LGBT-friendly adult bookstore, opened at 3141 West 25th Street sometime between 1968/1969.

    His job pays minimum wage with 8 percent commission on product sales, which have been slow lately. You can follow them at twitter.com/dclarkwithane.

    This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2022 and Love and Sex (2022).

    But it doesn't matter whether I work here or someone else works here."

    Police have been cracking down lately.

    August 3, 1978.

  • “Grand Jury Indicts Cicero In 15 Area Explosions.” Plain Dealer.