"Peep-Show Show-Offs"

Exhibitionists Turn the Tables on Strippers

by Dan Kapelovitz

On his way to his insurance job in downtown San Francisco, Tom walks into a local peep house. He changes his twenty for a fistful of quarters and waits for his favorite booth, the one with the largest two-way window, to become vacant.

After a few minutes, an elderly man hastily exits the sticky-floored masturbation chamber. Tom enters, locks the door behind him and inserts a few quarters in the beatery's coin slot. A partition rises, revealing a small, mirror-lined room populated by four girls prancing around naked. One dancer makes her way to Tom's window. She bends forward, spreads her ass checks, and positions her pussy and anus in the window for her peeper to admire. Between her spread legs, she can see Tom, who now has his pants around his knees and his penis in hand.

The white-collar pervert motions for the girl to come closer for a better view of his engorged phallus. She obliges by pressing her face and tits against the glass. Certain that she is watching, Tom pulls a birthday candle out of his briefcase and inserts it up his urethra. He then takes a larger taper and shoves it up his ass. After lighting the two candles with his Bic, Tom dances around with a goofy grin on his face. The girl laughs at the bizarre spectacle.

Tom pulls the candle out of his rectum and, with the wick still lit, shoves the now feces-covered end into his mouth. The dancer gags at the sight, but her horror only fuels Tom's passion; he pulls the small candle out of his peehole and violently strokes his shaft until his semen extinguishes the flame.

The time expires, the partition drops, and Tom wipes himself off with the conveniently supplied Kleenex on the wall. He pulls up his pants, carefully places his candles back into his briefcase and continues on his way to work, arriving just in time for his first appointment.

***

The majority of peep-show patrons pay to watch nude girls, but a significant portion of these men derive their thrills from performing various acts in front of their captive and naked audience.

Carol Queen, a sexologist and former peep-show worker in San Francisco, describes a frequent customer known to the dancers she worked with as "Dildo Man." "He had a dildo with a suction cup on it, and he would stick it right on the window and lube his butt up and back right into it."

Dildos are not the only objects peep-show hams shove up their asses. "This creepy guy had a home-made plastic tube with a light in the middle," remembers a San Fernando Valley, California, peep-show worker who goes by the stage name Topaz. "He put it up his anus, and then he shoved his ass toward me, and I could very clearly see the walls of his anal cavity."

Many dancers claim they don't mind these acts of exhibitionism because they actually break up the monotony of parading around nude in front of masturbating men all day. "My favorites are the real performance artists," says Erika Langley, author of The Lusty Lady, a photography book that chronicles the behind-the-scenes action of the Seattle, Washington, peep palace of the same name where she works. "It's entertainment for us...something really wild or far out or unusual is always shared with the rest of the [dancers on the] stage. I've seen a guy light his pubic hair on fire with a lighter. Then he kind of patted it out, and he was masturbating while he was doing it."

Occasionally, jackoff artists go too far, causing the dancers to call for security to kick them to the curb. Some men want the girls to watch them as they create messes (of the non-cum variety) in the booths. "The most unusual guy I ever saw, he was very show-offy," says Queen. "The first thing he did was come in and show me photos of him and his girlfriend doing scat play. Then he said, 'Let me show you what I like to do.' He did a little shit scene, and I was all, 'Sexologically speaking, man, that's really cool, but you can't smear that around here. I'm gonna have to ask you to stop.' "

Pissing in front of a young, naked girl is another peep-booth standard. "Guys would come in and urinate in a cup or a bottle," says Lilith, an ex-dancer at the Lusty Lady. "They would want you to watch them drink it. That was fairly common. They'd want to see your reaction, and frankly I just got bored; this isn't really sexy to me. It could be that their fetish was just so weird that they couldn't get it taken care of at home, and I can respect that."

Another favorite biological fluid for peep-show audience participants is semen. Instead of their own cum, they prefer to ingest the spunk of those who have jacked off before them. "Guys that were into licking the glass were called 'slugs,' " explains Queen, "because, with their tongue trails, they would look like a slug from the other side of the glass."

"Guys would especially come into the corner booth or the one-on-one talk booth, where the glass is larger," recalls Lilith. "They would come in after another man had already ejaculated in there, and they would lick the other person's cum and talk about it. They really were getting off on being seen doing that."

"We try to discourage [eating cum]," says Langley. "I think the actual HIV risk is low, but it's yucky."

According to Reno, Nevada, psychiatrist Dr. Xavier Kaye, peep-booth show-offs are attempting to affirm their manhood. "Men are exhibitionists because they are insecure about their own masculinity, and they want someone who sees their genitals to feel very startled, which confirms to them that indeed they do have a penis and testicles, and someone's reacting to them."

Kaye further explains that peep-booth exhibitionists are also gratified by the fact that their stripper audience has little choice but to watch their shenanigans. "It can be a power thing, where the exhibitionist is having some control over someone else, forcing them to do something that they may or may not want to be doing. In this case, they want to shock the dancers."

Sexologist Carol Queen has a different theory. "If you take sex into the public arena in any way, you are rebelling against the cultural notion that you probably learned at your mother's knee, that sex is private or even dirty. So you are saying, 'I don't believe that; I want to let it fly free.' "

A particularly favorite pastime of these exhibitionists is to compel strippers to watch them shove objects up their urethras. "I was brand-new, and this guy was really intently watching me," recalls Lilith. "He was watching me and smiling and encouraging me to come closer to the window, and I did. And he was using some sort of a tube and inserting it into his urethra. He really wanted to see my reaction. That's the first time I had seen anything like that. I was very alarmed; so I just danced away from the window and moved on to some other customer."

Another masturbator is famous among Lusty Lady dancers for inserting ball bearings up his penis hole and shooting them out against the glass as he ejaculates.

While the possibilities for these perverted one-on-one performance pieces are endless, some men become extremely aroused as they beat their meats by merely revealing unusual outfits to the dancers.

"There's a guy we call 'Baby Man,' who wears diapers and has a pacifier in his mouth," says photographer and exotic dancer Langley. "There was also a cross-dresser who would have a bra and garter thing on, and he liked to jack off on a Barbie doll."

Guy Gonzales, a former mop man at Show World, a famous Times Square peep-show establishment, remembers a businessman who went into a booth, removed his three-piece suit and changed into a Little Bo Peep number.

A 32-year-old peeper named Derek enjoyed fondling his genitalia at the Lusty Lady while wearing the purple dinosaur head from a Barney costume, until he was permanently banned from the Seattle peep house. "They actually have a Polaroid of me [without the Barney mask] that reads, 'Do not let this man in,' " says the outraged exhibitionist.

Although Derek claims his unique choice of masturbatory attire was the basis of his persecution, a Lusty Lady employee who wishes to remain anonymous explains otherwise. "He would hang out in the hallway, not even going into a booth, and start masturbating. He wanted everyone to see him jerk off—the dancers, the employees and even our paying customers."

Unlike Derek, most peeper-performers are relatively considerate. "People with special needs tend to be a pretty well-behaved group," explains Langley, who maintains a philosophical attitude toward her attention-seeking patrons. "There aren't a whole lot of places you can go and do this, and it's cheaper than a therapist."



(This article first appeared in the January 2002 issue of Hustler Magazine)

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