Pleasure Chest Sex Shop Celebrates 40 Years with Adult Baby Jesus, Monkey Giving Condoms and 'Dancing With the Porn Stars'

Lina Lecaro

Pole-dancing at the Pleasure Chest anniversary party

For more photos check out our slideshow, Nightranger: Gloryhole @ The Pleasure Chest (NSFW)

Forty years is a long time to be excited about anything. Even sex. Yet here, in the sealed-off parking lot next to the Pleasure Chest, it's less a 40th-anniversary party than it is a bacchanalia for the venerably notorious West Hollywood sex-shop landmark.

The essence of this celebration -- and, ultimately, the Pleasure Chest itself -- is freedom. Free drinks, free feels to be copped, and a free show within the furry, white walls of a makeshift glory hole erected inside the store. Making things happen: It's the American way. Sordid goings-on are revealed behind those walls in this place, which caters to kinks of all kinds. It's a place where S&M could just as easily mean salesmen and mechanics.

Lina Lecaro

More pole-dancing

Outside, a man with stilts duct-taped to his shoes easily cuts through the throng of pornographers, modern primitives and the voyeuristically bemused. These are people for whom the Pleasure Chest was intended: the rogue, the renegade, the queer.

Event producer Lenora Claire, a noted bon vivant with hair as red as the soul of an exploding star, trots up, introducing me to a 6-foot-tall baby in an oversized, stained onesie. His fetish is known as paraphilic infantilism. It's a fetish that has led to a brisk business in making realistic latex infant masks that cover the entire head. All those masks are sad babies, but such one-dimensionalism is as insulting to kink as the missionary position. The tears on the baby's face lend a brighter glow of realism to the mask. It's just as quickly dimmed by the booze in the baby's bottle.

Lina Lecaro

Paraphilic infantilism

Inside, two women test a stripper pole set up in the front of the shop. There is some question as to its structural integrity. Far be it from the Pleasure Chest to be some place where someone could get hurt.

There's a whipping nook running like a well-lubed machine in the back, and a little monkey runs around outside in the crowd, wearing a funny suit and offering condoms. I point him out to Claire. (This is what passes for casual conversation at a sex shop.) She recognizes the monkey as he perches proudly on a pile of prophylactics and quickly corrects me about the gender. "She. Her name is Zuni." (Yes, it's always the women who are the thoughtful ones. Even when you're entering into a sketchy ménage à trois in a cheap hotel somewhere in West Hollywood -- they always buy you condoms. Then they weep bitterly. Hello, ménage à un.)

Lina Lecaro

More partying

A bus sits at the far end of the parking lot. Various hedonistic revelers emerge from it in multiple states of unbecomingness. After the baby wanders off -- apparently, his full name is Adult Baby Jesus -- Claire whispers, "That's Matt Cornell. He's also eXtreme Elvis, one of my all-time favorite performance artists."

Ever the peripatetic producer, she adds, "I put together a 'sexual' circus for the Pleasure Chest featuring Zuni, Cassidy Haley, the stilt walker, and Brianna Belladonna, the foxy sword swallower."

Karen Jackson

The whipping nook

Belladonna appears from out of nowhere and proceeds to do her silverware-polishing thing. Unfazed, Claire explains what happens on the bus: "I came up with the idea of 'Dancing With the Porn Stars' -- an obvious homage to Dancing With the Stars."

And the stars are there, clouded in dark matter as they generally are: pornographer and educator Nina Hartley; CyberSkin Voluptuous Pussy mastermind April Flores; indie-queer music producer Sean Carnage; street artist Buff Monster; and one of America's Next Top Transsexual Models (always tops, never bottoms).

"If I had my way," Claire says, "we would have made giant, mirrored testicles as disco balls. But there's never enough time to fit in every idea."

Lina Lecaro

The Pleasure Chest's wares

So why such affection for a sex shop? "I first became aware of the Pleasure Chest as a kid in the '80s, when my parents used to shop there," she says. "I remember finding some naked lady pens in a bag that said 'Pleasure Chest.' I started shopping there as a supergoth teen for bondage belts, and I still shop there. It's the erotic epicenter of Los Angeles."

I literally bump into owner Brian Robinson (free drinks are plentiful here). "We've been successful for 40 years because we've supported our community's sexual growth and exploration without judgment," he says. "If it's worked for 40 years, we aren't going to change it now."

Lina Lecaro

Director of business development and strategy Sarah Tomchesson -- yes, there is a strategy to all this -- butts in gracefully, echoing the sentiment. "Our work has always been driven by a belief that everyone has a fundamental right to pursue sexual fulfillment."

As for achieving sexual fulfillment? That's another celebration entirely.

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Location Info

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The Pleasure Chest

7733 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA

Category: General

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