![]() It was erotic and fun, had a little bit of danger to it. I’m a throwback to when sexual attitude was not clean. When the recession came, I lost tourism and convention business. People were going to match sites, VOD sites, free tube sites. So we had live sex onstage, but themed.įour or five years ago was when the theater business started changing. Three choir boys come up, they’re singing in harmony and one of the choir boys comes over and gets underneath the priest’s robe and starts sucking his dick. A priest walks down the aisle and goes up onstage. I had this group of men and we’d put on sexual skits. I created the Erotic Cabaret, which I had for four or five years. I still did very nice business because there’s wasn’t any “one-handed entertainment” yet on the Internet per se.īy 2000 life started changing. AOL came about and that actually helped me because people asked questions: Where can I go? What is the best time to go? You could sell product that way. The Internet didn’t affect me that much initially. Carol’s closed down in ’91 because Jeffrey Dahmer had picked up my employee Jeremy Wienberger, whom he killed. The party continued.īy the early ’90s, this area started to become revitalized. I managed to stay alive, give out information and condoms. The city agreed, which was very commendable for Chicago because in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco all hell broke loose. What the gay community did back then with the mayor, was convince him that establishments should stay open hand out HIV material and condoms. Chicago handled the crisis in a much different way. In San Francisco, Merv Silverman closed down all the bathhouses in ’84. There was just an immense amount of people. The party would finally quiet down around 9 or 10am in the morning. When the bar closed I had a huge surge of new customers. I started picking up a lot of people from Carol’s. Bijou did a good business once I opened up the second floor. That’s when I started to expand more into a sexual club. My feeling was that the way the theater was going to, I had to alter it into a sex club.īy 1980 Old Town was much quieter, there was a lot more vacancies. We had a lot of men watching the film, basically looking to cruise, meeting someone in the back, having quick sex and then leaving. The theater was built knowing there was going to be a lot of activity in the bathroom. We put that on for about four or five weeks then went right into adult films, always with gay content. I just couldn’t walk in and get a theater license, so the first thing we put on was Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech. Things started changing in this world and one of them was the opening of adult theaters which then brought gay sexuality into the general public. My first arrest was on a film called Flaming Creatures, which was a gay-themed film by Jack Smith. Underground films which showed nudity did exceptionally well. I was involved in a theater called the Aardvark Theater in Piper’s Alley. ![]() “The Bijou is deliciously nasty and I’m going to keep it that way.” As the iconic Old Town fixture preps for Stay Hard, its 40th anniversary bash, its feisty owner reflects: “The Bijou has never been pretty,” says Steven Toushin, 64, the straight owner of the oldest gay porn theater and sex club in the U.S.
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