San Diego- Two stops are all it really takes to get a sense of how San Diego’s sex business has changed.
Start at the Kitty Kat Adult Theatre on University Avenue in City Heights. Inside the shabby, windowless gray building, the sparse clientele of predominantly gray-haired men plunk down $6 for admission to a small, dark room where a large-screen television plays a loop of three pornographic videos.
From there, go to the Hustler Hollywood store, on Sixth Avenue downtown. Brightly lighted and sparkling clean, the store sells lingerie, sex toys and pornographic videos and DVDs. Men and women in their 20s on up roam the store, seeking advice from well-dressed clerks. There’s even a coffee bar.
The six-mile jaunt between the Kitty Kat and Hustler Hollywood seems like a time warp.
A generation ago, places like the Kitty Kat were the norm. Along with seedy downtown strip clubs and adult bookstores with blacked-out windows, they stayed on the fringes.
Today, San Diego County’s sex industry has blended into the larger economy.
Strip clubs are glitzy and more upscale, and their owners are trying to create an atmosphere attractive to both men and women. Additionally, the newer adult bookstores look more like Barnes & Noble outlets than dank outposts of sin.
Porno theaters have mostly been replaced by the Internet and adult videos, which offer anonymity and staggering variety.
Even prostitution has reinvented itself, as the women who have long roamed El Cajon Boulevard increasingly compete with escort services that advertise on the Internet.
All of this adds up to big business. How big is anyone’s guess, because the businesses in San Diego County are all privately held. No government agency can calculate with any certainty how much the various branches of the industry bring into the local economy. Even the police have no estimate of the industry’s economic scope.
Globally, the porn industry is an estimated $10 billion business. According to Adult Video News, the pornographic video industry’s leading trade magazine, an estimated $800 million a year is spent on erotic-video rentals alone.
Industry insiders say San Diego County’s strip clubs take in about $20 million in combined revenue. Adult bookstores take in about $25 million, they say.
Together, these businesses outpace ticket receipts for the Chargers football team, which totaled close to $35.8 million for the 2002-03 season. And they outdraw the San Diego Opera and San Diego Symphony, which have ticket sales of about $9 million a year combined.
Millions more are made by a slew of Internet porn sites with San Diego roots and by the area’s thriving online escort industry. Additionally, there are massage parlors, gay bathhouses, swing clubs, sex toy makers, lingerie modeling stores, film distributors and movie production houses that call San Diego County home.
Like much of San Diego’s economy, the sex industry here has benefited from its proximity to Los Angeles – where the San Fernando Valley produces most of the nation’s porn movies – and to a lesser extent Las Vegas, the center of the adult entertainment world.
Nonetheless, San Diego’s sex business pales in comparison with those of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where strip clubs can make as much in a month as a San Diego club does in a year.
Peter Luster, a local consultant who works with the Deja Vu chain of strip clubs, said San Diego’s sex business reflects the region’s culture: middle of the pack, seemingly stodgy but with Southern California’s libertine streak to distinguish it from more restrictive cities.
Still, he said, “It’s a very conservative, meat-and-potatoes town.”
And while the sex industry has its place in San Diego’s culture, it isn’t as accepted here as it is in places such as Atlanta or Houston, where politicians seem more able to set aside moral objections and appreciate the tax dollars.
In San Diego and surrounding cities, zoning and other regulations have limited clubs from opening, and bookstores and other adult-entertainment venues often face legal battles with city governments and citizens groups.
In 2000, the city of San Diego imposed a no-touch rule at strip clubs that outlawed the popular lap dancing and cut into the clubs’ profits. Efforts to overturn the ban were at the center of the ongoing San Diego City Hall scandal that involved FBI wiretaps and accusations of bribery against three City Council members, Ralph Inzunza, Michael Zucchet and the late Charles Lewis.
Skirmishes over regulating the sex industry ignore the larger cultural transformation of the past 40 years. Things that were once considered scandalous are now commonplace.
Tim Connelly, editor of Adult Video News, said Hustler stores are a prime example of the sex industry’s evolution.
“The Hustler stores are doing phenomenal business,” he said. “They are beautiful. They are cleaner than Starbucks, and they have better coffee, too.”
No part of San Diego reflects the changes in the sex industry more than downtown. For much of the last century, the area vexed civic leaders determined to make it a more family-friendly entertainment stop.
Around the start of the last century, much of the area was known as the Stingaree and was home to a variety of saloons and brothels. Early on, public officials were hesitant to crack down, worried that if the businesses were run out of downtown, they would fan out throughout the region.
Later, politicians had no such compunctions. In recent decades, city officials have worked to push out the area’s decaying sex trade to transform downtown’s Gaslamp Quarter into a fashionable night-life district. To accomplish that, the city prohibited adult-themed businesses from opening inside the Gaslamp’s 16-square-block area.
The plan has worked almost flawlessly. In 1980, 30 adult bookstores, movie houses and porn shops called the Gaslamp home. Now there are two such businesses, the rest having been squeezed out by rising rents and dwindling demand.
“Twenty years ago, downtown was, in a word, seedy,” said Lt. Robb Hurt, head of San Diego’s vice squad. “Strip clubs were everywhere on lower Broadway and Fifth Avenue. It is not the same place. I can’t believe this great plaza and fountains. I remember when we were dragging prostitutes out of that area.”
Now prostitutes are just as likely to be found in an Internet or Yellow Pages ad as on a street corner.
They work under the guise of escort services, and are far more expensive than a street-corner prostitute, charging a minimum of $150 an hour whether they have sex with their client or not.
The police have registered more than 200 escorts in San Diego to monitor those who legitimately work as paid companions. But the number of the city’s escorts who are paid for sex could well be in the thousands, said San Diego vice Sgt. Mark Sullivan.
Sullivan said it is impossible to track the number because many don’t operate out of San Diego. Known as “circuit girls,” these women can live anywhere, setting up appointments via the Web and catching a plane to meet their clients.
Escort businesses remain at least superficially legitimate by making the women independent contractors and operating under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The owners of the services say they are simply schedulers and only hire women to spend time with clients.
It is difficult for vice officers to suppress smiles when they hear that line.
“Our position is that there are very few legitimate escorts in San Diego,” Sullivan said. “As a rule, guys will not pay for a nude entertainer to just come and dance.”
Pick up an adult video and odds are it came from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.
Still, as that industry has mushroomed in recent years, churning out thousands of videos a year, even Los Angeles hasn’t been able to supply it with enough talent. Because of that, San Diego has become high on the list of secondary markets.
La Jollan Dave Cummings, a veteran producer and, at 64, the self-proclaimed oldest active male porn star, said one-third of his female performers are from the region.
Cummings, who asked that his stage name rather than his real name be used because of what he called “safety issues,” demonstrated the depth of San Diego’s talent pool at a Learning Annex class for would-be adult video entrepreneurs at the Hanalei Hotel in Mission Valley.
Tapping video boxes with women pictured on the cover, Cummings told the class of 13 men and two women: “San Diego. She’s from San Diego. San Diego girl. San Diego.”
Finding talent in San Diego is as simple as running an ad in the newspaper, said Frank Bongiorno, who heads Purrrfect Video, a local production company that makes soft-core adult films.
“It’s the easiest thing I do,” said Bongiorno, 34. “You can thank the girls of Santee, El Cajon and Lakeside for our industry here. I get 90 percent of my talent from East County.”
But making money in the porn business is not as easy as lining up would-be starlets. The porn industry is a victim of its own success, churning out more videos than the market can sustain. The Internet, with its video clips and movies on demand, also has squeezed the video production industry.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Cummings told his class of would-be sex entrepreneurs, “but there is a huge glut.”
And it costs plenty of money to produce the films, too. The female performers are paid $600 to $800 a sex scene, which typically takes a couple of hours. Male performers are paid $350 to $500.
An additional $13,000 covers the costs of the crew, equipment, printing the box covers and copying the videos or DVDs. The distribution company takes as much as 30 percent of all sales as well, Cummings said. And that video will be one of the more than 1,000 released that month.
“It is not the industry it used to be,” he said.
Perhaps nothing has done more to transform the sex business than the Internet. Its speed, privacy and infinite scope are tailor-made for purveying pornography.
According to Websense, a local company that tracks Internet content, the number of porn sites is 17 times greater than it was four years ago, growing from about 88,000 sites in 2000 to nearly 1.6 million today.
Of this global business, San Diego has an important sliver, said Bob Rice, who left the bar business seven years ago to become a local adult Internet entrepreneur.
Rice considers San Diego County to be one of the nation’s hubs for Internet porn, ranking it a seven on a scale of 10, with an estimated 300 to 400 Internet sites. They range from small amateur sites to porn industry pioneers.
The reason for San Diego’s popularity as an adult Internet hub has to do with geography and the region’s heavy concentration of Net-savvy people. When asked why they’re here, most adult webmasters offer the same response as many waiters, accountants and construction workers: “Why not sunny San Diego?”
A more important reason may be Bustyamateurs.com. The infamous site of Internet porn’s pioneer days was started in San Diego and employed many of the people who have gone on to start their own sites.
In its heyday, Bustyamateurs raked in as much as six figures a week, former employees estimate. The site was taken down when its founder discovered religion. But its staffers, grown accustomed to easy money, went out on their own and have started up more than a dozen sites with local ties.
However, the days when a computer geek could post a few racy pictures on the Web and become a millionaire are long gone, said David Quitmeyer, who operates five adult sites.
Quitmeyer said he totals about $3,000 a month from subscriptions as well as commissions he charges to other sites to which he diverts traffic. Those profits are not used to pay Quitmeyer’s mortgage or car payments, but to splurge on family vacations to such places as Disneyland.
Rice sees the shift of many adult businesses to the Internet as not just an economic boon for San Diego, but a societal one. As a parent, he said, he doesn’t like the idea of adult-themed establishments being out in the open.
He asked, “Would you rather have 500 adult bookstores in San Diego or 500 adult Internet sites?”