Steven Toushin is an American producer and distributor of gay pornographic and BDSM films who has operated adult theaters and sex clubs since 1970. He owned and managed the Bijou Theater in Chicago—the oldest gay adult theater and sex club in the United States—and built Bijou Video into a major pipeline for underground and classic gay SM titles. He has also published books on BDSM, obscenity law, and his own courtroom wars. For kink and gay BDSM history, Toushin is not a side character: he is the theater owner, catalog man, and federal-target who kept extreme leather cinema circulating when community standards still meant “mail it to the wrong zip code and go to prison.”
Career: Theaters, Sex Clubs, and Bijou
In 1970 Toushin and partners presented at the Aardvark the first hardcore pornography film commercially released in the U.S.—Alex DeRenzy’s Pornography in Denmark. That booking flipped the Aardvark into a porn theater. The same year, Toushin and partners opened further theaters and sex clubs across Chicago, San Francisco, Indianapolis, East Chicago, and Gary, Indiana, including the Festival Chicago, Festival Indianapolis, Termite, 3-Penny, Eden, Savages, and the Bijou Theater. His first federal obscenity trial arrived in 1973 for screening Ranch Slaves. Over decades he and his businesses became the subject of twenty-one obscenity cases, including two federal trials; he suffered thirty-five personal arrests and more than two hundred busts of his businesses. That volume of enforcement is itself a map of how hard U.S. law hammered gay SM exhibition and mail-order porn after the sexual revolution opened the door.
Through Bijou Video he produced and distributed multiple underground and classic titles—especially material that mainstream straight adult houses would not touch. The Bijou as physical space and catalog brand made Chicago a permanent node on the gay leather and BDSM film map: not only screening rooms and sex-club infrastructure, but a distribution brain that kept Mistress Ann–era brutality, oral extremes, and leather protocol on tape when local juries still called it garbage.
1989 Federal Obscenity Trial and Operation PostPorn
Toushin’s second federal obscenity fight began in July 1988 when grand juries in Tennessee and Utah indicted him for distributing Erotic Hands, The Final Chapter of Mistress Ann, You Said a Mouthful, and Please Sir—films that depict extremely brutal and degrading S/M scenes. Toushin argued that his BDSM films were not legally obscene. At indictment time the U.S. government was also investigating in Nebraska; an indictment there followed. All three probes grew from Operation PostPorn, a nationwide federal investigation spanning nine U.S. cities that led to indictment of twenty people and fourteen corporations, including Toushin and his companies.
Prosecutors sought “obscenity by the standards of a local community” by having U.S. Postal Inspectors in Tennessee, Utah, and Nebraska order catalogs and magazines from Toushin’s Chicago businesses. Tennessee District Judge John T. Nixon noted there was no established evidence the films had ever been sent into the jurisdiction except for copies ordered by the Government. Toushin asked to transfer the case to Northern Illinois; Nixon refused, holding that the appropriate fact-finder is a jury from the community where the offense took place and that transfer should follow only “intentional overreaching.” Nixon found that although the Government induced mailing of allegedly obscene materials to Middle Tennessee, the defendants made a deliberate decision to conduct business there by mailing them—classic Miller-test venue warfare. The judge had consistently shown displeasure with the Government’s attempt to “fabricate venue,” but the case still stands as a textbook of how federal post-porn operations tried to drag gay BDSM mail-order into the most hostile local standards they could manufacture.
Books and Public Voice
Toushin wrote The Destruction of the Moral Fabric of America, recounting the 1989 Nashville federal obscenity trial, interweaving modern obscenity law with prison observations, a proposal for certifying “masters, mistresses, slaves, and pro-dommes,” a chapter on Jeffrey Dahmer (who killed one of Toushin’s employees), and Toushin’s theory of BDSM and the sexual future. With Puppy Sharon he published The Puppy Papers—based on a woman’s search for her “master” in BDSM—and the sequel Puppy Tales, continuing their power-exchange relationship on the page. He also produced The Cock Coloring Book, a blunt fetish object in print form. The bibliography is not polite memoir; it is courtroom trauma, puppy play, Domme certification fantasy, and serial-killer adjacency from a man whose employee was murdered by Dahmer—raw Chicago adult-business history with SM as both product and private life.
Awards and Why He Still Matters
In 2007 Toushin received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the GayVN Awards in San Francisco. In 2009 he was inducted into the Founders Branch of the Adult Video News Hall of Fame at the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. Those plaques sit on top of a career defined by Bijou Theater longevity, Bijou Video catalogs of hard gay BDSM, and decades of arrests that read like a civil-liberties war diary. Industry halls of fame rarely induct people whose main public trail is twenty-one obscenity cases; when they do, it usually means the work built infrastructure others later took for granted—screens, catalogs, and a continuous archive of leather extremes.
For adult readers mapping leather cinema and the legal risks of extreme SM porn, Steven Toushin is the pioneer who ran the room, shipped the tapes, fought the postal stings, and still insisted brutal Mistress titles were protected speech—not “obscene” by default just because a Tennessee jury was invited to watch. Bijou Theater’s claim as the oldest gay adult theater and sex club in the U.S., Bijou Video’s underground pipeline, the Operation PostPorn multi-state indictment pattern, and the books that mix puppy play with Miller-test war stories form one continuous dossier: gay BDSM media as business, as fetish, and as federal target. That dossier is why his name still surfaces whenever historians ask who kept hard SM on American screens when community standards were a weapon.
