All of my stories are drawn from experiences I have had. This last is a composite of several experiences I have had, as none of them alone would be more than a page long.
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The older you get, the less you care about what most people think, and the more you care about the opinions of a select few. And when those few fall out of touch with you, it's very easy to just say "fuck it - I'm going to do what makes me feel good".
In the 70's, video booths were called "peep shows", and were often just curtained alcoves with one film playing on a continuous loop in each alcove. I visited my first one when I turned 18, and was pretty turned off by the smell and the lack of privacy. By the turn of the century, this had changed by politicians and by shop owners. The former trying to do away with smut, and the latter trying to make a bigger profit from it, by catering to the desires of their customers. This meant making the merchandise more varied, and from higher quality producers, and keeping the shops cleaner and more protective of customer privacy than before. The alcoves turned into booths and the booths grew doors, all happening in stages of two steps forward, one step back, one step to the side, all in a continual dance with regulators.
And society had changed. In the 70's, homosexuality was still considered a mental illness, and interest in sex outside of marriage got you marked as a pervert and a potential danger to society. By the turn of the century, the tide had turned, and sex was not a complete write off, but regulations kept shops a certain distance from schools and churches, which meant a drive to find one, unless it was old enough to have been 'grandfathered' in the regulations.
There were three gay spas in town then (there's now only one left) and a number of adult book stores of varying quality. The worst were the individual shops, which tended to be in the more run-down and desperate parts of town, and one visit to one of those was usually enough to convince you not to return. The stores tended to be small, not too clean, and in places where you didn't want to leave your car. And the customers also fit that description, so I wrote those off immediately.
There were also a couple of chains that did bigger and better business. The shops were bigger and cleaner, the merchandise more varied, and the selection of movies in the booths better and easier to access. And by then I had resigned myself to being someone who went to adult bookstores to get off. My social life had collapsed faster than my bank account, and I felt myself unworthy of more.
So in my early 50's, I got into a pattern of going to a local ABS once a month or so, and rubbing off a quick one. I'd done enough experimenting earlier in life that I no longer felt ashamed of what I was doing -- it was just a facet of who I was, and not something to feel guilty or ashamed of. Not that I talked about it around family and co-workers, but it was what I did.
I have found that places like that have an arc they go through. People find them, and check them out gradually. They learn what the store management will put up with, and the store learns how far they are willing to go to indulge their customers without attracting the attention of the authorities. Things accelerate along a fairly predictable path bounded on one side by money and on the other by law, and the customers fill the available space, usually with hard-ons. And when the word gets out, a lot of people gravitate toward the new 'happening' place. And then, sooner or later, the people that cannot get any action anywhere else -- the Trolls -- move in, and the place ceases to be 'happening'.
But if you can catch one of those places at the right time, it can be amazing.
There was one that was in an industrial park very close to a major shopping area that turned into a happening place at about the time I started looking for a release. It had (and still has) a significant shop in the front with just about everything you can imagine going to a porn shop for -- magazines, movies, toys, condoms, lube -- plus a hall of video booths and a theater section with two separate rooms. My first few times there I just went into the video booths and watched through the tiny peep holes drilled in the walls between booths until I saw something I liked, and then I knocked on the wall and invited the guy in the other booth into mine for a blow job. Simple, no strings attached action, no questions asked.
Very reliable.
Private enough.
Fairly satisfying.
Predictable. Dull. Boring.
