Arcade Quotes

“That was the moment when I knew I was in real trouble, that I might really be the kind of person you weren’t supposed to be.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“It goes without saying that a great majority of men are sex addicts, or would be if they could manage to get laid.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“It bothered me that we behaved differently when other people were at the arcade. It bothered me that we had to be different at different times. I wished we could always be ourselves.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“There is such insane variety within the world of male genitalia.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“It might have been the real reason I went out there at all, to hear all the nice things guys had to say when they got you alone, when they earned their shot in a booth with you.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“Greg had told me on the ride over that there was another organisation called SLAA, which stood for Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. He didn’t know the difference between the two, but this was more conveniently located, and anyway love wasn’t his addiction.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“Late at night especially, one’s standards could slip unimaginably.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“They were looking at videos, and the woman was giggling quietly, as they often do in porn stores, unable to believe what they’re seeing, the monuments men have built to vaginas and to the very notion of sex.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“The longer I went to the arcade, the more it felt like a study in rejection. It certainly wasn’t a place one went to forget one’s shortcomings.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“If you wanted someone to save you, I saw, it was a cinch finding someone willing to try. Same if you wanted to save someone else. It was an undiagnosed fetish, some kind of mutual need that drew people together …”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“One of the great gifts of the arcade was the way it put us all on the same level.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I’ve always understood pornography to be an industry growing ever more granular, appealing to smaller and smaller segments of idiosyncratic perversion.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I am sometimes in awe of all that I have been exposed to culturally that I never would have discovered if not for the pursuit of sex or sexual gratification. I think of all the movies I watched when I was young simply because I thought I might glimpse a nude body.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“These insatiable cocksuckers have transcendent experiences giving head. They’re happiest when they’re at it. It’s amazing. You can’t believe it when you connect with one of them. It’s simultaneously incredibly fun and mildly terrifying, particularly when you imagine all the legs they’ve sat between on the floor, just there to perform a service. Don’t mind me.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“They exert the full force of their will in striking the image of straightness, which they pull off surprisingly well considering that their genitals are in the mouths of other men.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“The guys who appeared to have a genuine interest in the videos and products at the arcade confounded everyone. You couldn’t be sure who was actually looking to fool around. It was even more disconcerting when a straight couple came in to check out dildos and cheap negligees, as if taking a shot at spicing up their sex life or beginning in earnest their earliest dalliances into swinging.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I could have something like an encounter out there – a vicarious experience completely free of any fears of infection or the face-to-face intimacy I didn’t know how to process.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“People appeared to have no clue how truly horrible they were.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“What exactly are you looking for in a job? Like, what’s your best-case scenario for a new career?”
“I haven’t really thought that far. The best-case scenario is just that I look back on this entire era of my life and laugh and say, ‘What a weird time that was. I can’t believe I did that.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I’d learn over time to insist on chatting by phone before hooking up. It was prudent, I thought, to see if the guy sounded like the type who might ejaculate and then murder me in the throes of shame, or lock me in his basement for the remainder of my life, or hold me down and rape me. Or drill holes in my head and inject boiling water and hydrochloric acid into my brain, the way Jeffrey Dahmer did with his hook-ups to try and turn them into sex zombies.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I had been someplace none of my friends or family would ever go, smelled the smells and seen the sights.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“Real men don’t need porn.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I’d never have thought of the residents of those neighbourhoods as community activists, though it did make sense that, if they were going to protest anything, it would be the possibility of gay sex in their immediate vicinity.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“My friend and I took turns taking the magazine home, reading it over and over again until we had all but memorised it, in the process learning with awestruck disbelief about such things as golden showers and fisting. I was never without men’s magazines after that.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“In a forum online I saw a thread about favourite smells. There was the usual stuff about fresh cut grass, babies, and whatever, but slowly a controversial contingent arose which named the smell of their own balls as their favourite aroma.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“Once in a while I found myself actually slipping in cum, skidding around the tiny space praying to find traction before I landed in a puddle of some stranger’s gooey discharge.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade

“I couldn’t help wondering what it was that made me not good enough. It was a familiar feeling. I’d had it off and on my entire life.”
― Drew Nellins Smith, Arcade