Coming out as gay in St. Louis in the ‘90s wasn’t easy. In those days, LGBT visibility meant either Ellen or Elton, and I chose “none of the above.” Being loud and proud in a public high school welcomed daily forms of verbal abuse and threats of way worse. To complicate matters, streaming was still a decade away — the closest I got was that vertical scroll of a loading jpg, which could take seconds to unspool on the computer screen thanks to glacial dial-up speeds. Phones had cables and plugged into that same port. So, I had to leave home to learn about gay life, to make sense of what I was going through, and to connect with my still-hypothetical community. One such sanctuary, now extinct for today’s youth culture, who can only glimpse them through nostalgia-drenched Netflix series, was the video store.

Mine was called Whiz Bam. I found it in 1998, nestled on the same strip of downtown St. Louis that housed a piercing parlor (Cheap Trx), a diner popular with punks (South City), and a lesbian coffee shop that served up a weekly vegan brunch (MoKaBe’s). With its curved, colorful walls and checkerboard flooring, Whiz Bam felt more playhouse than arthouse.

When I sat down with co-owners Geoff Kessell and John Rutledge recently, Geoff confided, “I don't know if we ever escaped the impression that we were some horrible porn shop…which was always funny. If you looked at the displays John was doing, they certainly weren't [pornographic] unless you fetishize fifties kitsch!”

While the candy-colored window displays might have drawn me into the storefront, it was the tapes that lined the walls, and the queer owners who stocked them, that set me on my life track working as a curator, historian, and archivist of queer media.

St. Louis is a big city, but its values are very small-town. I remember being told by my guidance counselor that I would be safe as long as I never discussed my “lifestyle” publically. So, as the only out kid in a 1,600-person high school, I never really found myself among my peers. The Internet had yet to give birth to social media and facilitate community-based connections beyond those questionable AOL chat rooms. The stacks at the local strip mall Blockbuster were similarly alienating. Indie video stores, however, harbored a social scene not unlike a contemporary record shop, where discerning taste and clerk scrutiny are still a rite of passage. When I found Whiz Bam, I hit the jackpot — in ways I’m still growing to learn.

The shop’s proprietors quickly became role models. They were a gay couple who defied the commercial odds and opened up a store that, in Kessell’s words, practically screamed “This is a gay-owned business and there are gay movies in here. If you don't want to see them, then don't look on the shelves.” They saw not just an opportunity, but a responsibility. “I didn't want to be a person who just bailed on St. Louis without trying to do something to move it forward.”

Defying the expectations of their clientele, Geoff and John refused to create an LGBT section to house the tapes that depicted queer stories. “I guess, we wanted them to work a little bit,” Kessell said. But those weren’t the only titles; they also tracked down the strangest films no one else would stock, at a time when VHS cassettes were the only way to watch them. I got my introduction to sweet gay cinema through movies like Beautiful Thing (1996), All Over Me (1997) and Priscilla (1994), but I also got a glimpse of the edge, renting flicks no one else in St. Louis would carry, like Mod Fuck Explosion (1994), No Skin Off My Ass (1991) The Living End (1992) and Begotten (1990).

Certain tapes, including midnight staples like John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and the bisexual classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) counted among their most profitable, but finding used VHS copies was exceptionally difficult and costly. Hot titles also meant higher theft rates. “Every anime tape we had I think got stolen,” Kessell told me. When the store opened in 1994, a new release tape ranged from $59.95 to $69.95 and would eventually balloon to $99.95. With a $3 nightly rental rate, the road to profit was steep. “It was really, really difficult to make money on these things, but we also had a lot of really low-budget crap horror, exploitation kind of stuff that didn't cost as much and made a lot of money.”

These were also the movies for which they risked everything. “When we opened… George Peach, who was the state prosecutor, was raiding video stores.” Fueled by a campaign from The National Federation for Decency, Peach busted mom-and-pop shops that carried pornographic videos as well as controversial tapes like Salò, The Tin Drum (1979), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Peach’s takedowns were so ruthless, and his own downfall so deliciously ironic, that the entire saga was dramatized in the 2005 film Heart of the Beholder. “No surprise! A few years later, [Peach] got caught with a hooker and this stockpile of porn that he had confiscated,” Kessell recalls. “A total sleazebag. He went to jail, but he put tons of people out of business in the process.”

Whiz Bam! shenanigans. Shot by Michael Kessell.

Even by 1994, an independent store like Whiz Bam was a rarified enterprise. That was the same year Viacom purchased Blockbuster and expanded the franchise’s global footprint to 6,000 stores by the end of the decade. A price war was waged between Blockbuster and rivals like Hollywood Video, slashing rental prices even further, to 99 cents for a weekly rental. “They had the buying power. A new movie would come out and they'd buy 25 copies and we'd have one or two.” The competition eventually brought Whiz Bam down after five years of business, but not before they watched so many others fold around them. “Bijou, who was the big player in terms of [St. Louis] independent video stores, we ended up selling off their inventory when they went out of business. I used to describe it as like the bombs were falling and we were one of the last boats in the water,” Kessell recalls. “It was only a matter of time.”

My 16th birthday arrived a month after they closed up shop for good in September 1999. In fact, I usually had to get my mom to drive me to Whiz Bam. “And you weren't the only one,” Kessell told me. “We wanted it to be the kind of place parents weren't going to walk in and go, ‘Oh my God.’ I was a failed social worker and I really wanted to focus on dealing with queer youth. Especially at that time.”

I remember one visit, selecting the maligned feature film adaptation of Dennis Cooper’s novel Frisk (1991, 1995), when Geoff took me aside. “Not everything on this tape is meant to be taken at face value,” he warned. Whiz Bam wasn’t really kids’ stuff. “We had several married, straight men who were trans, or cross-dressers, who would come in and rent things from us,” Kessell said. “It was like their secret, but they felt comfortable coming in. In fact, this one guy used to come in with his wife all the time.”

Interior of Whiz Bam! for St. Louis Magazine 1999.

I mourned the loss of Whiz Bam, but I also followed the lead of the two gay men who risked financial uncertainty for the sake of queer cinema. The fact that they let gay and bisexual videotapes live on the shelves next to art films and midnight movies, rather than ghettoizing them into a back-of-the-store Pride section was an energy I brought into my own projects. In launching Dirty Looks — first as a film series in 2011, then eventually as a 501c3 nonprofit and site-specific film festival (Dirty Looks: On Location) — I like to think I carried on the wily yet soft touch that Kessell and Rutledge brought to their stacks and design sensibility. I’ve toured the project all around the world, but it was born in that little St. Louis storefront with its queer cinema gems housed in clear plastic clamshell cases. I’m currently writing a PhD dissertation titled Analog Tendencies in a Film and Digital Media program. From the title alone you can guess their impact.

Theirs was an education through example. 15 years later, Kessell and Rutledge had relocated to New York and one night attended a screening at the White Columns art venue. It was a selection of videos that included the now-internet-famous short by Tom Rubnitz called Pickle Surprise (1989), featuring a young RuPaul and Lady Bunny. It was an event I had organized and our eyes widened when we recognized one another. “I have to tell you,” Kessell told me, “when we realized that was you, it was a proud parent moment.” And just like that, we were back in touch after so many years.

When I restored the video zine, Fertile La Toyah Jackson (1994) by Rick Castro and Vaginal Davis a year or so later, Geoff reached out to remind me that they had carried the tape. I never rented it, but I like to think that Fertile sat on the shelf and oozed into my consciousness, even then.

It seems like such a small thing, an indie video store that existed for just five years in 1990s middle America. But the sense of community Whiz Bam cultivated, and the window into otherwise invisible LGBT or alternative stories it provided, became an enduring part of my life. Geoff and John created a space where the obscure felt mainstream, where queer felt normal, and where outsiders felt right at home. Now I’m trying to pay it forward.

Published July 1, 2024