Head Cases

Rowe had, in fact, already been convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior, having shown his penis to an undercover cop at another park bathroom on June 23, 2000.

As the Pitch noted in a 2001 story, Rowe isn't necessarily the model citizen gay-rights advocates might have hoped for to make their case ("Unprotected Sex," December 6, 2001).

The same could be said about the people busted in a porn emporium outside St. Louis, who may end up overturning Missouri's sodomy law. Among them are a man and a woman who are married.

Award Video wasn't the kind of place people patronized with pride. Open for more than a dozen years, the porn house in High Ridge, a town on the southwestern edge of St. Louis, catered to the raw side of human sexuality, drawing customers who tended to park their cars in back and occasional picketers who insisted the place was a breeding ground for rapists and child molesters.

The front was a run-of-the-mill sex shop, featuring videos, magazines, blow-up dolls, lotions, leather and various rubber gadgets. More adventuresome patrons went straight to the back.

There, for a $5 minimum, customers could cruise between private video-viewing booths equipped with locking doors -- the more money they paid, the longer they could stay. Others watched porn videos on a big-screen television in a nearby room; an $8 ticket was good for eight hours. A similar room in the basement was reserved for couples.

Management billed the rooms as theaters, but there was a lot more than watching going on.

The theaters and booths were places to have sex. The sparse décor -- and semen stains -- reflected the purpose. Each booth held a paper-towel dispenser, a plastic chair and a trash can. The theaters were equipped with little more than benches and wastebaskets.

Award Video was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And on March 13, 2002, there was plenty of action.

About twenty people were in the store just before 10 p.m. that Wednesday night. The basement theater was empty, but at least eight people had gathered in the 10-foot-by-20-foot ground-floor room. Four men stood in a semicircle around a woman, who performed oral sex and masturbated them. She was blond and looked to be in her late twenties. Attractive. Call her Lori.

"We were just playing around and having fun," she says, speaking on the condition that her name not be published.

One of the men gathered around Lori that night was her husband. Tall and rugged, Glenn -- also a pseudonym -- looks a bit like Sam Elliott. Married a little more than a year ago, the couple appears very much in love, often holding hands while discussing a night they'd rather forget. He has her name tattooed on his chest. "We're open-minded," Glenn explains, leaving the rest to the imagination. "We like to meet people."

Glenn and Lori had driven more than an hour from a small town two counties away to reach Award Video, which they'd discovered through an advertisement in a swingers' magazine. There was nothing like it where they lived. This was their fourth visit. Fueled by a shared half-pint of vodka, they were more than ready to roll.

The men in the theater didn't limit their attention to Lori. As time passed, the men began masturbating and fellating each other. Then two men walked in. Almost immediately, Glenn sensed that something was wrong.

"They looked aggressive and hostile," Glenn recalls. "I thought they might be queer-bashers." He was worried enough to leave the party. "As soon as they came in, [Glenn] got weirded out and said, 'Let's go,'" Lori says. The couple retreated to a bathroom.

The newcomers surveyed the theater, taking mental notes that would later appear in police reports, court documents and news broadcasts. They were undercover officers with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, and they had arrived to shut down Award Video. While Glenn and Lori washed up, the officers moved to a booth, where they called a waiting raid team that normally served drug-search warrants. This would be a by-the-book operation.

Surprise was easy; Award Video had no windows. The only warning came when Bill (who asked that his real name not be published), an Award clerk who had stopped by as a patron on his day off, glanced at a surveillance monitor behind the front counter and spotted someone outside running toward the door. He looked like just another horny guy.

"I was talking to the clerk on duty," Bill recalls. "I went, 'I guess this guy's really in a hurry to get in here' -- those were my exact words. So [the other clerk] started laughing: 'Yeah, they're always in a hurry.'"