The closest thing my generation had to a right of passage was going down to the wood paneled room in the neighborhood pervs basement to see his special VHS tapes.
And ask any gay guy who grew up in the 80s and he’ll describe basically the same room: wood panels, an old ass console TV from the 70s, a woodgrain VHS player that loaded from the top, an overfull ashtray, and a beat up old sofa with mysterious stains on the fabric.
It always smelled like cigarettes, beer, and sweaty balls down there. There was no drinking age, no porn age and no pants allowed. If you were lucky there was a bong and an old realistic stereo with the coolest vinyl records that you ever heard, or maybe an Atari, but the big draw was always the VCR
Lemme tell you that the entirety of Generation X grew up unscrambling the porn with our minds on the cable TV and the chance to finally see it in the clear was absolutely irresistible to us.
I loved that room. I shot my second ever load there. They were wrestling naked on the screen and what I saw couldn’t be unseen. I came up from the basement addicted to pornography and I wasn’t alone.
By 1995 it was so much of a thing that Calvin Klein was taking teenagers to the wood paneled room on national television. It was so widely understood to be a grooming reference that they made a Maury Povich episode about it.
Though probably the cultural peak of the wood paneled room was when director Mark Romanek took a 17 year old Fiona Apple there for the music video for “Criminal” intentionally using the camera light to produce a sleazy vibe to the whole thing.
When I was a boy I saw my fate: Preserved forever on video tape. Down in the basement The things I had seen! It Warped my young mind And gave me new dreams… “A Porn Star, someday.” I said I would be and, somehow, The devil just came through for me.
This still turns me on so much!
This is really a perfect post and takes me back. So good!
This post is 100% based on my own expriences growing up but SO many people can relate to it.