San Francisco- from www.sfgate.com – This story involves rabbits, but it’s not a kid’s tale.

It began on a late August afternoon, 2007, in a porn distribution warehouse office in San Francisco’s Bayview district. It wasn’t a Getty party, but it was just as culturally significant.

Present that day to discuss a business deal that went to the heart of the city’s adult sensibilities: Theresa Sparks,[pictured] the transgender then-Police Commission president and CEO of the feel-good feminist co-op sex store, Good Vibrations; Sam Conte, a large, longtime, looming presence in the nightclub/strip-joint life of the city; David Sturman, a veteran California merchandiser of X-rated materials and son of the late, fabled Cleveland grand master of the porno business, Reuben Sturman; and Joel Kaminsky, a key executive in the old Sturman empire.

At stake was nothing less than the future of naughty pleasure and recreational pain. Could San Francisco maintain its uniquely quirky, righteous and spiritual approach to the sex industry that included unions for strippers and hookers and stores peddling vibrator empowerment? It was Birkenstocks/Manolos with a whip versus pinkie-ring peep-show dollars and cents sensibility: Good Vibrations itself, and everything it stood for, was on the table. And in the room that late summer was a combination of people you’d find only in this city.

Talk about opposites. Formerly a man who later became the California Assembly’s Woman of the Year, Sparks is out in every imaginable way. The other gentlemen are what Sparks affectionately calls “trench coat” adult-industry traditionalists who have lived partly in society’s shadow, more out of habit these days than to avoid the crusading prosecutors and moralists who used to threaten them regularly with jail or hellfire.

Sparks drove a cab, was on the Human Rights Commission and underwent electroshock over her gender crisis. The Sturman and Kaminsky names have made appearances on various criminal dockets over the years. Conte, decidedly Old World night life, runs almost all of the lap-dance parlors in town and has signed pictures of Frank Sinatra in his office.

After a long courtship that included tours of sex shops in San Francisco and Cleveland, a trip to Vegas and shared tables at the annual adult film festival awards in L.A., Sparks says she “drank the Kool-Aid” and sold the stores to Kaminsky and his company, GVA-TWN, with promises that they would keep the contemporary vibe.

That was in 2007. Sparks feels she was then unceremoniously ejected from the company by Kaminsky. But, worse than that, she fears Kaminsky is cutting back the company’s community involvement, media-darling marketing and generous employee policies and moving back toward the old corner porn shop setup with comatose, pimply clerks behind a cage at the counter.

“It still has the flavor of Good Vibrations” – probably an assortment of flavors – “but by cheapening the brand, they’ll end up killing it,” she says. “That would take something unique and interesting away from San Francisco.”

But the collective ethos of the original Good Vibrations, where every employee got a share, a vote, a profit distribution – and 90 percent of them were women – failed as a socialist experiment in, Sparks says, “redistributing the wealth.”

It was going under, and Joel Kaminsky, a business whiz, was the shining knight bankroller, trench-coat armor or not. We’ll see if he keeps the expensive $200 Rabbit vibrators in stock.

A recent visit to the Valencia Street store turned up pretty much the same merchandise that’s always been there, along with young, diverse clerks knowledgeable in a wide variety of latex, plastic and gyrating goods, as helpful as five-star restaurant waiters. Some of the halcyon-day perks and quirks are gone.

Kaminsky himself says he has kept key Good Vibrations personnel and will continue to run “a woman-centric business also friendly to men. It’s important to us to be relevant.”

The First Amendment porn battles have been fought and won. The notion of “obscenity” that endlessly tried to send people like Reuben Sturman to the slammer seems downright quaint and antique today, especially in this city. Now it’s about style.