Speaking of Puritanism, I noticed that the only Good Vibrations store not in the San Francisco area is here in Brookline, and Boston isn't generally considered the most, uh, sexually progressive place. How did you pick this city as your next base? From the time that I've been visiting Boston — and I've been visiting for 10 years now, closer to 15 — people started coming up to me and saying you're the only kinky person in Boston and they can't believe that I would come to Boston. I said, "You're the 15th person who said that to me today — you people need to go out and get together." Things have moved along in Boston pretty obviously since that time. Good Vibes had the opportunity to take on the lease of a previous business that needed to close and definitely had hopes of moving into other markets. Is Boston a good idea? Yeah, Boston's cool. So we did it and we're really glad. We're gonna have our independent erotic-film festival at the Coolidge Theater [Thursday, June 11 at 9:30;www.coolidge.org/node/2360]. I have to say that Boston is just a wonderful community. I really enjoy my time in Boston a lot.
What are the demographics at the Masturbate-A-Thon? This seems to be our plateau this moment — 200 in the door, 40 staff and performers, some of whom go on to masturbate when their shift or performance is over, some of whom don't. Take 25 people out of there, then you split the difference between voyeurs and participants. We have theater seating in there. We decided to just sell voyeur seats, because, frankly, where else can you see something like that? The thing is open for about 10 hours, so people will not necessarily stay for the whole time, but people will wander in and out and then leave or go get a soda — some of the masturbators stay some of the time and then get a voyeur seat. It's kind of convivial.
Two rooms, one has no cameras allowed whatsoever, for the more "private" public masturbators who don't want any of their family to see them... People aren't going to get any press or pestering in private rooms. The people who have wristbands, who there are more of, you can film/ask questions. Some of them are masked. So, in terms of the demographic, more men than women arrive — 60/40. We can't always tell the sexual orientation, but sometimes we can by how they group affiliate. Male-female couples often come together and camp out on one mattress — coming together is really great.
[The champion time holder] is sponsored by a Japanese toy company, Tenga, so they have a corporate sponsorship thing in the corner. It's like NASCAR. The first time they had on Tenga suits — they had a red suit with stripes on them. It's the funniest, greatest event ever. When the press do show up, Reuters was there, bloggers come, actually we encourage people to blog or tweet from the room. I kind of Howard Cosell'd the masturbate-a-thon.
