Law Practice Stories--Pornography

Warning:  This post is sexually explicit, but not gratuitously so. It is a true account of one of my more colorful assignments while I worked for the Seattle City Attorney. 

     The City of Seattle was trying to rewrite obsolete portions of its criminal code, and I was trying to deal with a section prohibiting obscene panoramas and peep shows. I envisioned something like a child’s stereopticon, but the Chief of Police said, “No, they use closed circuit TV.”  He knew he couldn’t outlaw “Adult entertainment;” that was a matter of the right of free speech. But he wanted extensive regulation of the owners of porn shops because he was concerned for their cash flowing to the mob.

     That was the late 1970s, and the porn industry—X-rated movies, nude dancers, sex toys sold at retail—was concentrated along First Avenue, near the Pike Place Market, together with tattoo parlors and convenience shops selling cigarettes, beer, wine, and $.50 condoms “for cheap fuckers.”  The female prostitutes worked uphill at 4^th and Union; boys called “Chickens” hung around the adult theaters, waiting for  Johns.

     To make his point, the Chief sent two vice cops to my office to take me and the head of the criminal division, Patricia Aiken, on a tour of the shops on First Avenue.  We started at a nude dance theater. Warning bells rang as we entered, and a manager rushed out, but recognized the officers, and waved us in. The dancers were all women behind a glass partition. They looked startled to see two women in the audience, and one pressed her face to the glass and shaded her eyes to be sure of what she was seeing. She laughed, shrugged her shoulders in the gesture that says “Oh, well, what the heck,” and proceeded to dance.

     Next stop was a video theater for showing closed circuit tapes in individual booths. The booths lined a very dark aisle, and when I reached for the wall to find my way, the cop grabbed my hand and said “Don’t touch anything!” He opened a booth and pointed out a hole that had been drilled through the wall between it and another booth, so occupants could have anonymous sex. He activated the video—probably inserted a coin in a box, I don’t remember, and showed us a live video of men having anal sex.

As we left the theater, I noticed a retail counter selling inflatable life-sized dolls and other sex novelties, including a box labeled “Ass hole.”

 Pat and I had gone on the trip with fairly liberal attitudes about the content of porn—or at least I had, but when we got back to the office, I think we each had the same reaction. We wanted to run into the bathroom and wash with hot water and soap; and we wanted to throw away our shoes. “They’ve cleaned it up,” Deputy Prosecutor Sean Sheehan told us. “They used to show a lot with animals.”

 Back at the office, I telephone Dr. Hunter Hansfield, M.D. at the Seattle-King County Department of Public Health. I wanted to know the health risks presented by places with sticky floors, places so filthy you couldn’t touch the walls.  He told me that the places were visited by men who were so infected that further exposure wasn’t going to make a difference.  But within a couple of years, the HIV-AIDs epidemic was in full swing, Dr. Hansfield had become nationally known as an expert on sexually transmitted diseases, and presumably, he changed his mind about First Avenue. It didn’t matter a lot. First Avenue was about to become gentrified. Tattoo parlors moved into the suburban shopping malls, and  X-rated movies moved into home VCR players . The little shops were displaced by upscale condominiums, and the new Seattle Art Museum occupied most of a whole block. Finally, by 2011, the last XXX theater, “The Lusty Lady,” closed its doors.

By then, the Lusty Lady had been operating for 27 years, and had become noted for its pun-filled marquees. The closure  inspired a certain nostalgia, as though the theater had become respectable.
 An hour after the Ash Wednesday quake.
We're Still Shaking -- Come Feel the Earth Move
During the W.T.O. riots...
W. T. Oohhhhhhhh! -- The Nude World Order
On Oscar Sunday...
We'd Like To Spank The Academy
On St. Patrick's Day...
No Body's Wearing Green and Erin Go Braugh-less
Christmas...
We're here for yule and Dancers, Prancers and Vixens
And Thanksgiving...
Happy Spanksgiving!
When SAM (Seattle Art Museum) first moved in across the street...
Welcome SAM! Once you've seen their nudes, come in and see ours.
When Hammering Man (a mobile sculpture across the street at the museum) was first installed...
Hammer Away Big Guy.

     At the time of my field trip through the porn shops, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that movies and performances were not “Obscene,” and therefore could not be prohibited, unless they appealed solely to the prurient interest, were patently offensive according to contemporary community standards, and were utterly without redeeming social value. By that standard, I have to say that the sights I saw on First Avenue were not obscene, because they were educational:  I had no idea that people did things like that.