You know, I love Utah, I really do. I grew up here, my family roots stretch back to the very first wave of Mormon pioneers in 1847, and, for my money, you’re never going to see anything as jaw-droppingly beautiful as the Wasatch Mountains on the first clear day after a snow storm. This is my home, and while I can imagine living in other places, I highly doubt I ever will.
But as comfortable as I generally am here, it drives me absolutely batshit insane when the busybody prudes of this state decide it’s time to dust off their torches and pitchforks and launch yet another crusade against their latest perceived threat to the moral well-being of the community.
Case in point: the kerfuffle over the Blue Boutique.
You see, The Blue Boutique — a well-established, successful, locally owned business that’s been in the heart of Salt Lake’s Sugar House district for 20 years — sells adult novelties. It sells a lot of other stuff, too — lingerie and futons and kitschy household items and cool retro bowling shirts and jewelry, just to name a few things off the top of my head — but all the bluenoses can think about are those naughty bedroom accessories that are kept in a dark little room off to one side of the store, the one with the swinging bat-wing doors and all the signage that says “18 and older ONLY.” These people must be from Krypton or something, because they apparently have some kind of uncontrollable X-ray vision that forces them to see only those items that everyone else has to make a real effort to encounter. If that doesn’t sound too likely to you — and I can see why it might seem a little far-fetched — then the only alternative explanation is that the protestors are being just a wee bit dishonest about the nature of this venerable business. In other words, when City Councilman-elect J.T. Martin “insists he could see dildos, X-rated movies and masturbation kits from ’10 feet away,'” as the article I linked above claims, he’s flat-out lying.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The fight over the Blue Boutique’s right to continue doing business in its longtime neighborhood has arisen because the Granite Block of Sugar House, named for the old Granite Furniture building and of which the Boutique has been a cornerstone business, is about to be demolished and replaced with a seven-story condo-and-office building. As a result, the Boutique’s owners have been forced to relocate. They’ve leased and remodelled a new building three blocks east of where they’ve been operating — without any protests or problems, I might add, at least none that I’m aware of — for two decades. The owners’ relocation plans have been made very openly, with no attempt to pull a fast one, circumvent zoning laws, or drop in suddenly on unsuspecting suburbanites who’ve never heard of the place before. But now, right on the eve of the Boutique moving into its new digs, the new neighbors are shocked — shocked! — to learn what this — and I can’t emphasize this enough — 20-year-old business actually sells, and now they’ve started picketing and sending petitions around in an attempt to force the Boutique to go somewhere else.
Feel free to roll your eyes. I have been ever since this mess first hit the news feeds a couple weeks ago.
If you haven’t guessed already, this controversy mashes down hard on several of my more sensitive nerves. First of all, I’m not very happy about the redevelopment plans for the Granite Block, which I fear is just another step in the seemingly irreversible process that’s making every part of this valley look exactly like every other part. (Yes, I know the area around the Boutique has always been a little seedy and that the buildings in question are run down, but I’d rather see those old buildings get some restoration work that leaves the historic flavor of the area intact than build some new-fangled, modernistic ice-cube tray. But that’s just me.) Then there’s the matter of the Boutique being a local business, which automatically makes me feel protective toward it, given how chain-happy we are in this state. (For the record, I’ve always preferred the quirky mom-and-pop stores to the chains just because I think they have more personality. However, in recent years, I’ve become more and more convinced that the big chains are detrimental to the soul, and certainly to the flavor, of a city. Again, do we really want every place to look and feel just like every other place, with the same eight or 10 businesses popping up every five miles? I don’t.) Finally, it really rubs me the wrong way when the self-appointed morals police start calling other people “perverts” and trying to bury a legitimate business that has never hurt anybody.
Look, I get that we all have different triggers on our personal offense-o-meters, and that the items sold in the Boutique’s adults-only room aren’t to everyone’s taste. I’ll be honest, some of that stuff gives me the willies, too. And I’ve also got a lot of sympathy for people who are trying to raise children these days, what with the virtual mainstreaming of porn and the pernicious, inescapable influence of marketing, consumerism, and materialism. But in my view, anybody who honestly feels threatened by the Blue Boutique needs to breathe into a paper sack for awhile until they calm down.
I’ve been in that store — its original, now-closed location, that is — on several occasions, and I can attest that there were no “dildos, X-rated movies [or] masturbation kits” visible to the casual shopper. Those items were kept in that back room I mentioned, out of sight of the general public, in accordance with Utah law. That’s the point that really needs to be made again and again and again: the owners of the Blue Boutique have done nothing wrong, and they don’t deserve to be treated like lepers simply because they want to remain in Sugar House, a neighborhood that has historically been very good to them. Their business is legal, and the zoning regulations allow it to be in the Sugar House area. And again, it’s been there for 20 years, with no complaints and no problems, at least nothing big enough to make the news. So why are the neighbors freaking out now?
They’re freaking because the Boutique used to be on a street that was entirely commercial and now it’s going to be on the corner of a residential street — their residential street — and they fear that having it there will somehow make them look bad. They’re worried that having a lingerie store within walking distance will impact their property values. And, as is always the case in these witch-hunts, they’re worried about the impending corruption of their precious children. (It doesn’t help that the new location is within spitting distance of Highland High School.)
On the surface, all of these complaints seem reasonable. But they’re really not. The window displays at the Blue Boutique are no trashier than what you see at Victoria’s Secret at the mall, nothing more than mannequins in bikinis and the occasional corsets or thigh-high boots. (Of course, Vickie’s has drawn its fair share of fire around these parts, too.) The original location looked seedy, in large part, because the building it hadn’t been properly maintained by the landlord. The new location is currently shrouded in plastic sheeting, so it’s hard to make out what it’s going to look like, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be clean and freshly painted, so it’s not like it’ll be a festering ulcer in the middle of respectable suburbia. In fact, I believe the new building has been unoccupied for some time, so putting a functional business there will actually be an improvement. And given all the hoohah over the past couple of weeks, I’m willing to bet the Boutique’s owners will bend over backwards to make sure that their window displays are inoffensive and that nothing untoward is in sight.
Finally, if the residents of Squeaky Clean Avenue think their kids will somehow be more tempted to go into the Boutique and look around now than they were when it was a mere three blocks away, well, I have some lovely ocean front property in Moab that I’m willing to sell at a loss. Never, but never, underestimate the willingness of a horny teenager to travel to get a look at something they’ve been told is dirty or otherwise forbidden.
The truth of the matter, I think, is that all these complaints are just excuses. The real reason the protestors don’t want the Boutique near them is because they just don’t like what the place sells, and they don’t like the idea that a lot of other people do. The former part doesn’t bother me — that’s what makes the world go ’round. The latter, however, is what gets me up in arms, because the prudes always want to impose their standards on everybody else, and I have a real problem with that. Because this is supposed to be a pluralistic society in which everyone is welcome to believe whatever they want, and to seek — within reason — whatever makes them happy. I’m not saying that we should be selling dildos at the cash register at 7-Eleven, but neither do I think there’s anything wrong with having a place nearby that keeps them “under the counter,” so to speak.
Oh, and in case you’re still wondering what I meant by my earlier remark about the morals police calling people perverts, it stems from a comment somebody made in the article I linked above. Some dingbat actually proposed staking out the Boutique and photographing every person who walks out of the store, then posting those photos on a website called saltlakepervs.com, presumably in an attempt to shame the customers and chill the business. I find it outrageous that anyone would even think of something like that; I thought that kind of puritanical social-pressure-to-conform bullshit died out with the publishing of The Scarlet Letter, or at least with the Hollywood Black List. Of course, I suspect the prudes will get a big surprise if they do try something along those lines, because most of their photos will probably be of frumpy, middle-aged house-fraus looking for something to spice up marriages that’ve run cold after ten years and three or four kids. They’ll probably even recognize some of their own neighbors’ faces.
(In an amusing side note, somebody jumped on that particular domain name within hours of the idiotic comment going public. Take a second to hop on over there and take a look. Go on, it’s perfectly safe… really!)
I guess my bottom line on all this is that the Blue Boutique is simply a store, not a portal to hell, and as long as this store’s more controversial wares are not in plain sight, there’s nothing to complain about. If you don’t like what’s sold there, don’t shop there. If you don’t want your kids shopping there, do your best to teach them your values and then trust that they’ll live up to those values. And as for the deeply offensive idea of trying to publicly shame the customers of a legitimate and legal business, it’s none of your damned business who might want to buy a rubber penis or what they might do with it, so just back the hell off. Learn to live and let live, people…
Coda: I’ve been working on this entry for several days, and the situation has evolved in that time. According to this article, residents who showed up at a Salt Lake City Council meeting last night were told that the law is on the side of the Blue Boutique. It is a legal establishment and all their permits are in order. Even if the prude patrol tries to get the law changed to forbid stores like the BB from the neighborhood, the BB will be exempt because it’s “vested,” i.e., pre-existing. The new location is set to open on December 15. I’m willing to bet there will be protestors, and that they’ll make what ought to be a quiet non-event into a media circus. I’ll go even further and prophesy that once all the furor dies down, the Blue Boutique will be a perfect, orderly neighbor, and years from now people will wonder what all the fuss was about…
