Justa Reply is Back! The Kansas City Scene in the 80's

Doc here with another outstanding report from Just-Reply, our intrepid reporter on the Kansas City market.  Take it away, Justa!
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 Back in the 80's there were several adult theaters in Kansas City. The Old Chelsea, The Dove and The Strand (which still exists, sort of) were the major ones. They would sometimes advertise in the back pages of the sports section of the Kansas City Star.

Come the 90s and there was a concerted effort to legislate all such businesses out of existence, yet at the same time the popular culture in general became much more coarse and debased. It's a phenomenon I find curious. Wish I could put my finger on the "why." Maybe in decades past women knew men were just going to be men, regardless, and let it be (and a few took advantage of it). Nowadays we've been stomped with the iron boot of Feminazism and ridiculous, overreaching efforts to "protect the children," even though prime time TV programming flows like raw sewage, "sexting" is the current epidemic, and girls with their ubiquitous "tramp stamps" casually hook up as the in thing to do. If she doesn't, she's like, so gay, girlfriend.

Visiting the Old Chelsea was like a trip back in time. You had to traverse a long, thickly carpeted hallway to reach the theater entrance. The hall was adorned with many large, faded, framed photographs of strippers who had worked the stage in years past; beautiful women in alluring poses wearing see-thru-nothings proudly sporting full muffs and '60s and '70s hairdoos. As is my usual luck, I missed the heyday of that scene, but had a good excuse-- I was a little too young then.

Meanwhile, there was Erotic City~~~

By the time I discovered Erotic City it had already been in full swing for several years. Located in a battered former convenience store, it sported the usual racks of movies, magazines, dildos, lotions, whips, smoking papers and other assorted flotsam common to seedier adult book stores everywhere. It also had a separate lingerie store, a big video booth area in the back, and a second-rate tittie bar upstairs.

The place was in a small slice of unincorporated county between Kansas City and Independence, an area the locals call "Dogpatch," which was home to a couple of junkyards and several run-down gas stations and houses. K.C. and Independence city ordinances did not reach there, which is how the place was able to operate as it did.

Even the hired help was seedy. A string of terminally bored and obnoxious women worked there through the years, some missing teeth, most of them pregnant off and on. Then there was a guy who sat the counter in the evenings. He was probably fifty and looked 70, had unkempt, scraggly slicked back hair, a complexion like burned oatmeal, and always wore a plain white, dirty t-shirt. He looked more like he should have been manning the coatcheck in Hell.

The thing that set Erotic City apart was the freewheeling video booth area. It was pretty much anything goes, and pretty much everything did go on back there. The booth area went through several iterations over the years. Very early on it had a small area of cocktail tables where people could meet and greet. The tables disappeared but then the booth variety got better. It had a mixture of small, one or two person booths, and larger "group" booths. For a few years some of the bigger booths had small, knee-high doors between them which were just big enough to step through and join people on the other side, and certainly big enough to play at if you wanted to remain separate. Several of the smaller booth pairs had glory holes, which appeared and disappeared periodically depending on LEO and county prosecutor focus.

Erotic City was horndog heaven. A constant procession of couples and very, very occasionally, single ladies passed through. There was so much pussy traffic that if you waited for a couple of hours, anytime of the day or night, something would come in you could doink. Many times you never had to wait that long. I went there over my lunch hour for years and if I showed up every day at noon I reliably soaked the sausage on average twice a week, and sometimes more often.

The standard M.O. was~ couple comes in, goes into a booth and shuts the door. You then would ascertain how things were progressing by putting your ear to the door crack. Incidentally, if you arrived late to the party you could usually tell if there was pussy in the booth just by listening at the door crack. Straight movies playing? Check. The booth light turned up a little bit (seen from the door crack underneath)? Check. A chick talking over the movie soundtrack? Check!

Then all you had to do was fight for a place in line and wait for the door to unlock. If the couple came to play, once they got sufficiently warmed up (a few minutes to a few hours later) the door would unlock, you'd go in and partake of whatever flavor of goodness they were up for, and be on your merry way. Repeat when horny.

It seems all good things must inevitably come to an end and so did the video booth heaven at Erotic City. By the mid-nineties several factors combined to run most of the couple traffic off. First, the always present gay crowd began to view the booth area as their personal playground, not to be sullied by the likes of women They'd tell the management the ladies were charging money and get them thrown out. Second, they hired a gay security guard, who, in cahoots with his gay buddies, ran lots of women out of there. Third, AIDS became a nagging worry which scared many off. And fourth, the rise of the Internet made it possible for people to hook up online.

The death knell sounded when some guy began bringing his underage stepdaughter in for gang-bangs. Must've been a phase they were going through as after several episodes they quit coming in. Actually it was like that with most couples. You'd see them frequently for a few weeks or months, then they'd be gone, never to return. Anyway, several years later the stepdaughter outed Mr. Stepfather as to what they'd been up to years earlier during that brief period. Mr. Stepfather went directly to jail, did not pass go, nor did he collect his 200 dollars. That was enough to finally galvanize the county into action and laws were swiftly enacted which effectively killed Erotic City. A sleepy ABS still exists in the original storefront, but the booth area is closed for good.

Gone but not forgotten, as I'm sure many a local hobbyist would attest.