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September 2, 2007

Extreme Makeover: Adult Bookstore Edition

I used to go to the Tom Cat Bookstore, downstairs at the Sansom Cinema a lot 15-20 years ago. It was lots of fun. Then I moved away and came back. The Tom cat seemed the same, if a bit deteriorated, but it just wasn’t fun anymore. It seemed both too bright and dingy at the same time. It was depressing. And empty. I only went once in the two and a half years since I moved back to Philly.

The other day a friend told me it had been remodeled so I went back on Friday night. It’s a whole different place. The bright lighting has been dimmed to a more reasonable level, a lot of it incandescent black-light, and the white walls have been replaced with brown and black. Most of the small arcade-style booths have been replaced with group sex spaces. Nice.

Admission is $10. I inserted bill into the machine and was automatically buzzed in, no need for human intervention. Just inside the door is an area with four brand new, clean and roomy black video booths with benches nicely padded with black vinyl. The benches are sort of sticking out of one of the side walls making them ideally placed for lots of different kinds of play. On the other side of the room, up a step, is a large triangular space lined with padded seating, a mirror covering one wall and a flat-panel monitor showing porn. The monitor is oddly placed and can only be viewed without incredible distortion by a really tall person standing directly in front of it. Weird. There was a good-looking (but not what I go for) Asian guy in a white lycra pullover hanging around this area most of the night. He spent nearly all of the time, I’m not kidding, standing in front of the mirror, adjusting himself and fixing his hair. It ws pretty amusing.

I went through a short hallway and made a u-turn to where the pool table used to be. Now there are two dark rooms there, painted black. The smaller one had a table and more padded seating along three walls and a monitor on the other wall showing a different movie. People seem to have made this the unofficial smoking room even though smoking is banned here by city ordinance. The second room has a 10 foot free-standing tongue-and-groove wall with some planks missing at crotch and eye-levels, sort of one long gloryhole. It's lit my one bare energy-saving black-light bulb. Very nice.

I had to exit that area through the same door I entered. After a left turn is a hallway with an alcove with more seating. Across from that is a door that seems to say "Do Not Enter" but the jokey sign, one of many in the place, says nothing of the sort really. Behind the door, which can be locked for privacy(!!) is a good size room lit only by a strobe light. There’s a huge metal cabinet on wheels, big enough to fit four, but, i promise you, it will fall over some day and seriously hurt someone. It’s wicked unsteady. The strobe light made me dizzy and I had to leave right away. The room was empty anyway. Maybe I was dizzy because I was spinning my arms around like Pete Townshend. Who knows?

After that is a large clean bathroom with a toilet, toilet paper(!!!) and a trough urinal! It’s not the kind someone can lie down in, by the way! A small section of the old booths are back in this area. They don’t seem so bad with the new lighting and people used them a lot. No gloryholes here or in the other booths which is the one major oversight I found. This section is brighter than the rest of the place but still, thankfully, dimmer than the convenience store glare of the old place.

Finally, just off the rear exit, another secluded dark room lined with benches and a table. I had some real fun in that room.

By the way, the jukebox, which was always pretty good, is gone, replaced by piped-in techno music throughout which is, surprisingly, not deafening.

I was very impressed. Whoever put the new Tom Cat together should be applauded. Between this place and the new baths, Philly finally has a couple of sex clubs worthy of a major American city. Unfortunately, both places share a common problem: There was hardly anyone there. At 11 pm on a Friday night, there were less than a dozen paying customers. What?? It seems really new, so maybe people just don’t know about it yet. I hope that’s what’s wrong. I’d hate to think that gay men in Philly suffer from the “we’re not New York” syndrome that people accuse us of having and think we don’t deserve a good, clean sex club. I have to say that more guys showed up as the bars closed. Sadly, since it’s within two blocks of all of the gay bars in Philly, the crowd was not very impressive.

Part of the problem might be that younger people are much more sex-negative, believing that they’ll catch something just by walking into a place, than the previous generations were. They also seem not just turned off, but actually repulsed, by the idea that someone over 25 might be in their immediate vicinity. (It’s like Jen not wanting Evel Dick to touch her in a competition on the first day of Big Brother 8, although I wouldn’t want that saggy-ass chicken-hawk to be anywhere near me either!) While some of them would like a place like this, they will never go to one unless every patron is someone they find attractive. That’s something that has never bothered me and I don’t think I’ll ever really understand it. Oh well.

I did have sex while I was there, though not as much as I would have liked. It could have been more satisfying, too. But more about that tomorrow. I’m heading to bed.

I’m listening to “I Can't Make It Alone” from Dusty in Memphis by Dusty Springfield.

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Posted by HighStrungLoner in Gay at 4:58 AM

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Posted by: Alan on March 20, 2008 12:08 PM

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