It takes Sterling, Va. cosmetics salesman Charles McWilliams under an hour in a Crystal City basement to turn into a woman. Beneath Freddie's Beach Bar, alongside the Kosher salt, lime juice, and nacho cheese, McWilliams sweats and smokes his way into Ophelia Bottoms, the drag persona he's perfected over the past decade.

McWilliams got into a drag as a 21-year-old college student, when he performed as Chuckatea Banana between classes in Virginia Beach. "When I first started, it was all about the 'real-girl' look," he says. "I would try to look as much like a real woman as possible. . . . and I was very successful." Now, McWilliams performs a more theatrical female persona, but he has an even tougher time shaking his feminine side. "Dating sucks when you're a drag queen," says McWilliams, who has become too recognizable in the local gay scene to pass as just-a-boy anymore. "I can't go on a date to a gay bar if I don't want the person to know," he says. McWilliams' secret usually comes out pretty quickly, though. "You know, you take someone home, and there are the wigs everywhere, the piles of crowns, the trophies. . . . the 8-by-10 picture of myself in full drag sitting over the television. At that point, it's pretty obvious."

The finer secrets of McWilliams' trade, however, don't come so easily. McWilliams agreed to let City Paper into the basement to learn exactly how to paint and pad your way into womanhood. "Every man has the potential to look good in drag," says McWilliams. "Sometimes, the ugliest men become the most beautiful women."

FACE. After McWilliams' second facial shave of the day—everything goes, from beard to sideburns—he smears a layer of foundation over his face and sets it with a vigorous powdering. The make-up base begins the process of feminizing McWilliam's face—changing the contour of the nose, cheek, and hairline. It also helps shield the performance from the elements. McWilliams' routine was tested at this year's Pride Parade, when a steady rainfall threatened to melt the facade. At the end of the

two-hour gauntlet, McWilliams' gown, wig, and crown were sopping wet. "But my face didn't move an inch," he says.

CHEEKS. "You can tell what drag family you're from based on the cheek," he says. McWilliams' personal blush routine, a full-contour look which sweeps from nostril to earlobe, is known as "The Ophelia cheek." Naturally, McWilliams is protective of the technique. "Some other queens use this style that—I'm sorry, but it looks like a strip of bacon," he says. McWilliams has a name for the line of blush which only

reaches halfway down the face—"the racing stripe." Ophelia's cheek inspires a more iconic sports comparison: "Mine is like the Nike swoosh."

EYES. Ask McWilliams which colors look best on him, and he'll run through the rainbow—"yellow, blues, greens, purples, reds," he says. "Most of them." The trick is being able to pull them all off at once. One of McWilliams' elaborate eyeshadow techniques, known as the "Tequila Sunrise," creates an entire skyline between the lid and brow: "you do the red faded to yellow faded to white with all the oranges in between," he says. McWilliams' favorite color scheme to layer above the lashes is the "Rainbow Pheasant"—"it's basically making sure every color is in my eyes," he says. McWilliams tops the shadow off with a lush fake eyelash set he applies with bondage glue. Then, he applies a final coat of mascara to blend his real eyelashes intto the fake ones. "You wouldn't want someone to get too close and see the double set," he says.

EYEBROWS. McWilliams has his eyebrows thinned and arched with regular waxings, then preps them for performances with dark liner. Other girls prefer to pencil in the whole thing. "Some people, that's how I've always known them—they've never had eyebrows," says McWilliams. "But the first time a girl shaves the eyebrows, it's scary. It's like, What the hell happened to you?" he says. "She'll say she slipped. But she always did it on purpose."

BODY. "The first thing you learn when you become a drag queen is not to scratch your face," says McWilliams. The second thing? "How to tuck without making it hurt." Some girls use duct tape. Some use "really tight underwear." Others use the "reach around and pull." McWilliams' genital control comes courtesy of his "drag body"—three pieces of underthings which have him covered from crotch to chest. "It looks like a black bathing suit," he says of the support group. The extensive body control is hardly a quick fix. "I'm sweating like a whore in church," he says, letting his tongue hang out as he shimmies the thing on. "The smaller girls don't need all the midsection shrinkage," he laments. "They get to just wear a normal pair of panties."

LEGS. McWilliams pulls on four pairs of pantyhose to spare him a regular leg waxing. "Drag queens are like onions, they have a lot of layers," McWilliams says. He likes to pull them all on at the same time. "I keep my legs as a unit," he says of the thick nylon coverings, which stretch from his toes up to his chest. "The bottom layer has a lot of wholes in it." Come laundry day, the hose have to separate. "The package only lasts maybe a week—but in the summer, you really should wash them more often."

HIPS. McWilliams pads his feminine figure with the help of some household materials. "Sealy Posturpedics and JoAnn couch foam" are both common supports for naturally non-child-bearing hips. McWilliams' pair, two pillow-sized foam cutlets, carve out a more modest hourglass than McWilliams boasted in his youth. "This is my third set of hips," he says. "The first looked like the state of Texas. I've lost some weight as a boy since then, though, so my girl hips had to be downgraded as well." McWilliams' backside requires an additional four pads. "I double up, because I don't have a butt." The padding slips right into the pantyhose, where it stays put throughout the show—and in case of emergency. "It's super helpful if you ever get into a car accident," he says.

BREASTS. "I've had these breasts for five years," he says of his silicone chest supports. "They've been through hell and back." The old standbys are "heavy as hell, and they make a great weapon," McWilliams says. Other queens opt for less serious artillery—foam, birdseed, or rice. The edible option has its charms—"drag queens sweat a lot, so the rice will expand and your tits will get bigger"—but basmati breasts can also lead to some unwelcome drag drama. "The rice can leave starch on the chest area, which is right on the heart, and when you sweat, it can seep in and give you a little mini heart attack," McWilliams says.

HAIR. Life as a drag queen requires fastidious removal of the real stuff—and serious investment in the fake. On performance days, McWilliams shaves his face twice—and also takes the razor to his chest if he's opting for a more revealing outfit. McWilliams' flip-side requires some more serious consideration. "I'm a hairy monkey, so I have to get my back waxed," he says. When McWilliams isn't getting hairless, he's faking volume. McWilliams amps up his naturally thick ponytail with a selection of wigs—different hairpieces can take him from a Wynonna Judd to a "fat Madonna." The hair, too, requires padding—a "bumper" that sits on the top of his head. McWilliams' best bumper is assembled from another small wig, turned inside out and pinned into a ball. McWilliams' bigger headdresses require a bump up. For the most fabulous hair-dos, he swears by a full-size bleach bottle with the handle cut off. Grocery bags and newspapers work in a pinch.

FASHION. McWilliams is performing ABBA's Dancing Queen tonight, so he's traded his "boy clothes"—jersey shorts, HRC t-shirt, and tennis shoes—for some white go-go boots, a shiny silver belt, and a wing-armed lime green dress which falls slightly below his well-tucked crotch. Plus: accessories! "The bigger the girl, the bigger the boobs, the bigger the rocks," McWilliams says. This time, McWilliams completes his disco ensemble with bangles, teardrop earrings, and an oversize ring. The bling varies based on the routine. "I'm most known for my 'Erotica,'" says McWilliams. "I have a signature vibrating glove that I wear with that number."

Photos by Darrow Montgomery.

[youtube:v=0YPGdk3OS3c]

 Whatever the reason, my $5.99 New York strip steak dinner appeared in short order. Sure, I did have to ask the waitress to break my $10 bill, so I could have a steady supply of singles. CCR has a rather aggressive dancer schedule. No stripper shakes it longer than the length of a single jukebox song. That means they get up there, quickly strip down to pasties and a G-string, perform a number of limber exercises designed to expose the naughty parts of their anatomy, and get the hell off the stage.

And then they come right to your table, where protocol says  you give them at least a buck for wiggling their butt cheeks in rhythm. I felt obligated to pass out dollars even as I was stuffing my face with beef. I felt like Dad at the dinner table passing out money to his daughters.

OK, the food: The plate arrived looking like a snapshot from my own private eating hell as a child. I grew up in Omaha, beef capital of America, and yet my family couldn't cook a steak to save their souls. I remember chewing and chewing and chewing at some overcooked, underseasoned piece of meat — until I would give up and just spit the nasty wad out in my napkin. Or just hold it in my cheek, like a chipmunk, until I could spit it out in the toilet.

CCR's gray slab of beef brought back all those memories. It didn't help that the New York strip was about as thick as a book of poetry. Its sides didn't inspire much hope either: a stack of extra-wide steak fries that looked barely cooked and a bowl of sliced green beans, previously frozen or canned if I were a betting man.

The meat's thinness, in fact, reminded me more of skirt steak than strip, even though it clearly was the latter. There also wasn't a char mark within a mile of that steak, which means the protein likely never came in contact with a grill. I was not looking forward to my first bite.

Now, I don't want to oversell this, but let me say this about the first bite: It was far better than anything I could have imagined, particularly at that price, particularly  with its underwhelming appearance. The steak was well-seasoned, the salt and pepper bringing out the meager flavor of that thin cut. The seasoning, in fact, was the make-or-break element of the meat. Those bites not sprinkled with enough S&P were lifeless.

I have absolutely nothing kind to say about the sides, other than the fact they were less embarrassing to stare at than the women on stage.

Crystal City Restaurant

The place looks rather harmless from the street. It features a brick-and-tile facade that gives little indication, save for the silhouette of two mammothly endowed women, of the nude acrobatics going on inside. Unlike at Camelot Show Bar, where I ate lunch today, you have to seat yourself, which is sort of a pyschological test to measure your perv and shame levels.

I decided that if I'm going to do this thing right, I'm going to sit right up front, by God. I claimed a four-top booth near the stage and plopped myself down. I promptly ignored the dancer about eight feet away and checked my e-mail accounts, typed out an e-mail to a source, checked facebook,  looked for comments on my previous postings, logged on to Twitter, and generally acted like I was at the office for about 10 minutes.

I clearly need work on my strip-club etiquette.

The waitress here wasn't required to perform her job wearing lacy underwear. She wore a short skirt and a casual top, looking no different than, say, someone working the tables at an Eastern Shore crab shack or a sports bar in Bethesda. She handed me a menu and left me alone to review its many choices. 

I opted for the most dangerous entree: the New York strip steak dinner special, available on Wednesdays. The six-ounce strip (ugh!) comes (double ugh!) with your choice of potato, and a vegetable side. All this for the low, low price of $5.99.

I felt like I was in Las Vegas, back before all the celebrity chefs arrived and the only gustatory attractions were the all-you-can-eat buffets for $5.99 a head. The lines for those buffets could be longer than the queue to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland. 

My memories of those buffets are not too kind — slices of roast beef that had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, a broad and lifeless array of vegetables, and a chocolate cream pie for dessert. The shit was designed, I figured, to get you back to the gaming tables pronto.

I wasn't sure what the $5.99 New York strip steak dinner was designed to do, given the attraction of Crystal City, one presumes, has nothing to do with what's on the plate. But nonetheless, the management has one stipulation for its ultra-cheapo steak special:

Dine-in only.

Its tenants  show up on the scandal sheets as sure as USC quarterbacks show up in the NFL.

For more than half a century, the house has been owned and operated by The Family, a secretive clique of right-wing men of the cloth and men of the Congress. Either the structure itself or the landlords suck the righteousness right out of anybody who calls it home.

Only a fraction of what we'll eventually know about what goes on behind closed doors here has come out yet. But this much is already certain: Show me a recently disgraced Republican, and I'll show you somebody who did hard time at Fellowship House.

Gov. Mark Sanford? Yup, long before he hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Buenos Aires to have fellowship and hopefully go bang-bang-bang with his soul mate, then-Rep. Sanford was railing righteously about the need to impeach Bill Clinton for sexual relationsish activities.

Sen. John Ensign? And how! Ensign enlisted some roommates, including Sen. Tom Coburn, to help him break it off with a concubine/campaign aide from back in Nevada. After the Ensign adultery scandal broke, Coburn refused to discuss what role he played in funneling hush money to Ensign's strange, claiming doctor/patient privilege.

Coburn's a gynecologist!

Rep. Chip Pickering? You know it's true! According to a lawsuit filed by Pickering's pissed wife Leisha, the five-term Mississippi Republican started re-bootying with an old college flame while living at the Fellowship House.

Since nobody's talking about living conditions, we can only imagine what kind of parties this Family throws. Just from reading the papers about all the moral turpitude, I gotta figure they're a lot like the bashes thrown back in the day by the Manson Family, minus the cool music and clothes.

According to the couple, most residents of the U.K. prefer Durex-brand condoms.

“They are a hell of a lot cheaper here, and we do try to take a lot of stuff back with us, but we’re definitely not taking these.”

Millions of British tourists flock to the U.S. each year to make the most of bargain prices, but research by Washington City Paper suggests that few will be returning with suitcases full of condoms.

Nobody at Church and Dwight Co., the company behind the Trojan range, was reached for comment.

Two men loiter between the “eye care” and the “vapor relief” sections. They look around. They seem on edge. They’re sizing up the condoms. I understand their distress—confronted with eight shelves of contraceptives, how's a girl guy to choose these days? “Twisted Pleasure” or “NATURALAMB”?

I decided to make their whole experience a little more embarrassing by conducting some market research of my own.

“Most people will get the ultra-thin, or the ultra-ribbed. They’ll go with that,” says one guy in his early twenties. “But if you’re smart like me, you’ll go for the Ecstasy type.” He assures me that Ecstacy is the best: the Chateau Lafitte of the condom world. They are ultra-ultra-thin. “Its all about the feeling,” he explains.

It’s not only the brand, of course. Condom selection is also a numbers game.

“I’d get a big box. It’s a sign of commitment,” the second gentleman tells me, before picking up a pregnancy test and dragging his friend down the aisle—“He’s got to find out if his girlfriend’s pregnant.”

A third customer has a slightly different view: “You know men are always gonna get Magnums because it says ‘big size.’ They get that even if it comes off," she says.

This appears to be a recurring problem for her. “You know my boyfriend—well, my ex now—always used to get them, and I’d tell him he didn’t need that shit.”

"We started talking about things we were mutually interested in, like China," says Camper, who, as a consultant, has worked on Chinese affairs. "It was a very happy circumstance."

Gao was visiting Washington while preparing for a United Nations conference next month up in New York as part of a large Chinese delegation on youth issues. "I wanted to see the country and visit a few places." She'll be visiting a few more spots now. "It was a very productive encounter," Gao says.

And how: Camper, 59, remembers when he knew he'd have to propose—over dinner at Dupont Circle's legendary Nora restaurant, "just professing my love for Xiaoming and the difference she's made in my life." After realizing their "personal, professional, and spiritual" bond, he proposed soon after over another dinner in Ellicott City, Md.

Gao, 29, wasn't expecting it; she thought it was just another date. "It took me a little longer...to know it was the right thing," she says. "A few days more."

But she knew it was.

Their union demonstrated many of the trappings of the modern American wedding. Camper bought her a sizable Tiffany diamond ring. ("I have to step back, it fills the screen too much," said officiant Toni Gore, taking a picture of the rock.)

And there will be a big honeymoon: Before the end of the year, the couple plans to travel to China, visiting Gao's family in Beijing to be followed by a retreat to Tibet. They'll then repair back to the States and their new apartment in the Kennedy-Warren building in Cleveland Park.

About the only unorthodox thing might the setting for their vows. The couple was joined by Camper's brother and sister-in-law, and their three young children.

Says Camper, "We talked about doing a family celebration, having my parents come from Oregon...but I guess it was really a matter of timing. Xiaoming has her conference coming up, and we wanted to move forward with paperwork, get her a work permit."

Gao says she has no problem with the courthouse ceremony: "For me, like city hall is the center of the city. It's like a symbol of becoming part of the city."

But I have an overly developed sense of shame. I can't look at naked women and drink. So I tell the waitress that I want water.

"Sure, one bottled water," she says and immediately walks away before I can correct her. Still, sparkling, or tap are apparently not options offered at Camelot. It's bottled or nothing.

The bikini waitress drops off the smallest bottle of Evian I've ever seen, along with a tiny wine glass filled with ice and two straws. I can't tell exactly from the scribbles on my final bill how much I paid for the water, but it appears to be somewhere in the $6 to $7 neighborhood.

It's going to be a long lunch.

I've ordered the jerk chicken "chef's special" with the idea that, if I'm really going to judge a dish coming out of the Camelot kitchen, it might as well be something that the head cook at least claims to have developed himself. As a lark, I ordered a side of onion rings, fairly certain that they would be Sysco's finest.

My lunch took forever to reach me. I had sit through one stripper after another after another while the kitchen pretended they were busier than Ray's Hell Burgers on a Saturday night. This tactic, of course, has its desired effect: You feel compelled to do something while you sit there watching naked women climbing brass poles for your enjoyment. You either give them a buck here and there or wait for the dude sporting the oversized Polo shirt and nasty grimace to shake that fucking cash out of you himself.

I almost breathe a sigh of relief when the bikini girl brings my lunch. She tries to place the plates on the table without her boobs falling out of her skimpy green bra. Her technique has all the grace of a construction worker with a jackhammer.

The chicken is surrounded with sides: mashed potatoes (one step up from the boxed variety), wilted greens (bitter, a little spicy, and passable), and a large chunk of a hard, pasty baguette. The thick breast meat (of course!) is surprisingly juicy. I was expecting a hard, dry brick of overcooked chicken, but this breast is moist, even at its thickest sections. It also packs spice and heat, more than I thought the kitchen would serve the typically middle-aged clientele that waddles into the Camelot. The meat wasn't grilled, like genuine jerk chicken should be, but baked instead. No matter, I was pleased to savor something without feeling guilty.

Oh, and those rings? Totally from Sysco, or some other food-service giant.

The Deborah Jeane Palfrey story had boffo foreplay and a really shitty climax.

And it started right here at City Paper. That's where Palfrey, based in California, bought classified advertisements seeking local college-age whores to service her high-powered johns in the DC market.

Well, that was basically how legal authorities played the tale when they busted Palfrey in 2007 and charged her with a variety of prostitution-related crimes.

Not long after the investigation broke, Randall Tobias, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, was outted as a client of the hooker service. Tobias admitted to ABC's Brian Ross, the pervy looking sweaty dude with the teensy mouth who broke the Tobias angle and pursued the DC Madam story harder than anybody else in mainstream media, that he'd used Palfrey's services, but insisted he only got massages and never went around-the-world.

Tobias also gave the Palfrey story its  funniest moments, at one point telling Ross that he'd call up the Madam so casually it was "like ordering pizza," and later having to hear Ross report that Tobias' main task in the Bush administration was to run a program that aimed to help males in Third World“develop healthy relationships with women.”

Tobias, obviously, had trouble seeing this humor, since he was forced to resign shortly after Ross outted him.

But Ross also led us all astray, telling ABC viewers that Tobias was just the first of many high-powered types whose heads would roll once all the names in Palfrey's little black book were made public.

“There are people there at the Pentagon, lobbyists, others at the White House, prominent lawyers — a long, long list,” Ross said, telling a CNN audience that the whores worked jobs including "university professors, legal secretaries, scientists, military officers.”

But, in the end, the first big name, Tobias, was also the last to hang. Well, other than Palfrey herself, who was found hanging in a shed behind her mother's mobile home in Florida in May 2008, shortly before she was scheduled to be sentenced for convictions on money-laundering and other lame counts that didn't live up to all the early hype.

In retrospect, Palfrey probably would have been better off if City Paper rejected her ads. Oh, yeah: Tobias, too.

"It kind of ignited a fire," says Rebecca. They decided they had to do something to publicize the issue. So Eric's gonna run in chains. "They're painful," he says. "I don't recommend them." But he says they're an "easy symbol" for the problem.

Eric says he hopes his run will be a "tipping point." They want to raise a dollar for every victim of human trafficking—27 million, he says.

I ask about the safety of all this. "Aren't you worried you'll break something?" I ask. Proffitt's been working with a running trainer. "He's not a runner," says Rebecca. "He's a singer." (He's remade the Proclaimers' "500 Miles" with running-in-chains-appropriate lyrics; you can buy a copy here.) She and the kids will be following him in a van.

Eric's got special running socks, plus padding for his legs. The chains beat against him while he runs. "In a bizarre way it sets a rhythm," he says. "I try to run with the chains rather than fighting them."

"Say Wisconsin!" says one photographer. Everyone smiles. The followup: "Say Lebanese!"

"Taverna!" replies bride Rima Karim.

The geographical references reflect the bride and groom, respectively. Mike Neal, 37, is a native of Fond du Lac, and Karim, 39, grew up locally to a big Middle Eastern family.

This wedding is some 13 years in the making. They met in 1995 at Crow Bar, the late lamented West End biker saloon. "I invited him to be in my book club," Karim remembers. She can't recall that first book, "but we did read Geek Love," she says. The title of the freak-show novel by Katherine Dunn, in fact, is now the name of their wireless Internet connection.

They'd been talking marriage for a few weeks, Neal says, then got officially engaged on Saturday. Monday morning, they got a wedding appointment. Gotta start "planning for our financial future," he says. "We wanted to start off on the right foot."

Four friends came with the couple today, including members of the "Q Street Crew"—folks who lived with them in a Dupont group house.

Why the courthouse? Neal says "there's a hundred different reasons." Karim says it's simple: "The party's the important part. Save the money for the booze."

In fact, she says, there may be four parties in all: One with her family, one with his family in the Midwest, and a couple with friends. And the Midwest sojourn, she warns Neal, ain't gonna cut it for a honeymoon: "I want a real honeymoon. I want to completely unplug."

For now, it's lunch, then dinner tonight at Karim's parents' house in Vienna. The low-key affair extends to the wardrobe: She's wearing a "crazy, gypsy, sequined outfit" she found in her sister's closet. She bought a $10 shirt to complete the ensemble.

As for Neal, who is wearing khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt: "She told me what to wear."

Right here, Gary Hart's presidential campaign ended with a bang.

Well, that was the assumption of what went on behind these walls in the spring of 1987, just weeks after Hart had officially announced he was running for the top job.

Hart's reputation for womanizing preceded his run. So reporters from the Miami Herald who'd staked out his Capital Hill townhouse specifically looking for stray women didn't have to wait long to find what they were looking for. A young'n known not to be Mrs. Hart was spotted entering the residence, with Mrs. Hart known not to be home, on the evening of May 2 and not leaving until after the sun was warm.

Hart's campaign unraveled quickly and hilariously. He had just given an interview to the New York Times in which he insinuated there'd never be a reason to tag him with a Scarlet A.

"Follow me around," Hart said. "I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored."

The interview hit the streets about the time the woman who'd presumably just put some tail on him, later identified as 29-year-old Donna Rice, was caught by Herald reporters doing the walk of shame from Hart's townhouse.

Within days, the same paper published photos of Hart and Rice getting cuddly on a boat called Monkey Business, and Hart getting a lapful of Rice while wearing a "Monkey Business" t-shirt. Hart went from Democratic Party frontrunner to dropout within a week.

Rice went on to become a religious activist, specializing in keeping sexual predators from picking on youngsters. (Wonder where that came from?)

The Dems didn't see a viable candidate who could match Hart in terms of smoothness and lady's manliness until, well, John Edwards. (How'd that work out?)

In any case: Nice house!

MVC, pre-makeover

Until very recently, motorists traveling along Leesburg Pike in Falls Church and shoppers at MVC Late Night Video, a sex shop that sits on that road’s busiest stretch, were blissfully unaware of each other.

Thanks to thick black tint that darkened MVC’s large front windows, folks looking for the latest adult DVDs, magazines, and sex toys could browse without fear of someone they know driving by and seeing them. Drivers could chug right past the nondescript building and pretend the place was just a regular ol’ video store that happened to stay open very, very late.

But a couple of months ago, the tint came off, and all of that changed. Drive by MVC today, and you’ll see a clear window filled with mannequins dressed in lingerie, as well as rows and rows of DVDs. The store is separated from the street by a small service road, so you won’t get close enough to get a good look at the cover of, say, Team Squirt #10, but you might be able to make out the face of the person thinking about buying it.

An employee who declined to give his name says the removal of the tint was a strategic move to make the sex shop seem less shady and “more friendly to couples and women.”

“With the tint, it made it look worse than what it is,” he explains. “So, we took it off and put the lingerie up front so women drive by and can see it’s like Victoria’s Secret.”

MVC isn’t exactly like Vickie’s. The lingerie at MVC is a bit more tawdry and, well, Victoria’s Secret doesn't sell butt plugs the size of traffic cones. But the employee insists that more women visit now that they can see the place isn’t crowded with creepy guys in trenchcoats. He says a lady friend who lives in the area and never would’ve come in before is now a regular.

Still, what about the establishment’s base—the guys who like to sneak in on their lunch break and pick up a little porn without anyone knowing?

“Some guys may have preferred it, but this isn’t a porn store that needs tinted windows, it’s a sex shop for men, women, and couples,” the employee insists.

A survey of customers at the MVC today revealed that few of them had even noticed the change to the building. Most of them grunted some form of “didn’t see it ,” so either their attentions were, understandably, not on the building’s remodel during their visit, or they just didn’t feel like chatting up some woman standing outside of their favorite sex shop holding a notebook.

Only one man, a staunch opponent of the new look, stopped to express his outrage…on his way inside.

“They’ve gotta put the tint back—people wanna keep their business on the low-low,” he says. “And you don’t want a co-worker driving by like, ‘I know that person,’ and then saying, “Hey I saw you at MVC on your lunch break!’ They gotta put the tint back.”

The anonymous employee says the store has gotten a few more community complaints than usual since the curtain came down (“Don’t you know there’s a school nearby,” is a typical one, he says), but the store’s neighboring businesses don’t really seem upset by the change.

Sam, a manager at City Diner, across the street, says the new look is "nicer.” “You can see the girls, the mannequins, with their stuff on—it’s nice, you should be able to see that,” he says. So no complaints from families who frequent his eatery and now have a pretty clear view of MVC’s interior? “No way—what’s better than sitting down and having a hamburger and seeing some nice lingerie?” he says.

Well, I was wrong. The hardest part came when the dancer bounded off the stage and launched into that standard social protocol of all strip clubs: hitting up the patrons for cash while pretending to give a shit about them. The stripper approached my table. I had already placed my order.

"Hi, how are you?" she asked.

The interior of the club was dark, illuminated only by the sickly yellow glow of these backlit transparent panels, designed faintly in the style of a family coat of arms. Despite the poor light, I could tell this dancer was very tan. She was also young, although she was trying hard to act more mature than someone who shows her crotch for a living.

"You having a little lunch?" she inquired.

"Yes, just stopped by for a bite," I lied.

"What are you having?" she wanted to know.

I started to fidget, wondering if the meter was running in this young woman's mind and what the charge would be for me.

"I got the jerk chicken." This was true. After carefully and deliberately scanning the menu (while a completely naked woman danced on stage, mind you, and other women wearing sexy underwear paraded around the narrow room), I decided that the only true test of the kitchen would be to order one of their specials, not a burger or a sandwich. Hence, the jerk chicken.

The dancer looked at me blankly for a second, then said, "Oh, that must be a special."

"It is a special," I reassured her.

"The chef is good here," she countered. "You wouldn't think so at a place like this, but the chef is really good."

"What do you usually get?" I asked.

"I usually get the burger," she responded.

I looked at her in her bikini underwear, guessing that she couldn't be 100 pounds, tops.

"But you're so skinny," I protested. "You must not eat that many burgers."

"I have a very high metabolism," she said. She went on to describe how much she sweats and how people worried that she couldn't put on any weight, which then lead to various medical tests.

"They tested me for tapeworms,  too" she noted. 

The next image that flashed in my mind was enough to ruin my appetite — and any sort of side dish of arousal that might come from eating lunch around women without a stitch of clothes on.

The reporter introduces himself, asks to sit in on their wedding, hear their love story. Says the man, "It's quite a story."

Officiant Toni Gore launches into her script: "This is a civil marriage, not a religious one. It is a contract...." Halfway through, the man notices his Bluetooth is still stuck in his ear—he pulls it out, half-embarrassed. They exchange rings. Gore's instructions are precise: "Put it on the third finger of her left hand."

The woman goes to sign the marriage certificate. "Have you been practicing your new name?" Gore asks.

"No, I have not. This is the first time!" she replies.

Now for that story: The couple has been living together for 15 years, the man explains. She teaches, he's in corporate management. Finally, late last year, the two decided they'd get hitched. They came down to the courthouse, got a license, set a date—no big deal.

Then she got sick—gallbladder trouble. Last week, she got the diagnosis: terminal cancer.

The wedding went on as scheduled today. "None of our family know this is what we're doing," she explains. The thinking goes, she says: "Let's make sure we do all the things we have to do to make it right....Sometimes you just do what you know you should have done a long time ago."

(To protect the couple's privacy while they continue informing friends and family of her illness, I have agreed to keep their names and other identifying details private.)

The wedding was supposed to be a low-key affair, and it was. Both had married before. "We'd gone through the ceremonial hoopla," he says. She adds, "Been there, done that."

Her daughter flew in from out of state. "We were just gonna call her and tell her that we got married," he says, but he decided to have her come up so they could break her the news in person. She's the only person with them today, snapping pictures of them smiling, beaming into each other's eyes.

He reflects on why they decided to get married in the first place: "As you get older, you realize you've got to take care of legal things, make sure your house is in order." They'd "procrastinated" on those sorts of things, she said.

And now...

She says it's been harder on her husband. He's the one who has had to tell most of their friends about the cancer. "He's taken the weight off of me by telling everybody," she says. "You just relive it every time you say it."

That – sex once every 4.244186 days – is the good news.

The bad news is that D.C. sex is less good than in six other cities: The rate of sexual satisfaction among District dwellers is 65 percent, putting it seventh in the rankings.

Sexual frequency by city, per year:

1. Houston  101
2. Atlanta  88
3. Washington D.C.  86
4. Los Angeles  82
5. New York  80
6. Boston  79
7. Chicago  73
8. Dallas/Ft. Worth  73
9. Philadelphia  73
10. San Francisco  60

Rates of sexual satisfaction by city:

1. Atlanta  73 percent
2. New York  71
3. Houston  70
4. Dallas/Ft. Worth  67
5. Chicago  66
6. Los Angeles  66
7. Washington DC  65
8. Philadelphia  64
9. San Francisco  63
10. Boston  60

Neither Andrew McPherson, 26, nor Emily Buehler, 25, have brought a camera today. In fact, they haven't brought rings, either.

"We're trying to keep this on the DL," Buehler tells Gore.

They're not keeping it hidden from angry parents or scorned lovers or anything like that. Rather, Buehler and McPherson have a big-deal ceremony scheduled next month in Scotland. It'll take place in a historic kirk in the lowlands near the English border. "The heather's out right now, so it's very beautiful," Buehler says.

The two met more than five years ago in Grenoble, France, while studying abroad together. They went on to live for more than a year together in the U.K. Thing is, getting a marriage license there is a bit of a hassle. And it's rather expensive—upward of 300 pounds. So the District of Columbia, where they've resided for three years, is damn good bargain.

They've also got "stag" and "hen" parties set up in Europe. For his stag affair, McPherson's grown a nice bit of facial hair—a sort of combination Fu Manchu and soul patch he deems "Western, or trucker-style." It will match nicely, he says, with the tuxedo T-shirts his fellow partygoers plan to don for the festivities. Buehler will be meeting up with friends in Amsterdam for her shindig.

Gore starts the ceremony. Since they don't have rings, she omits the ring-exchange portion of the ceremony, turning a five-minute affair into a three-minute affair.

"You're just practicing with me?" Gore asks. "That's OK, you can practice with me."

After the ceremony, the couple sits and wait for copies of their marriage certificate—a relative bargain at $10 apiece. No party after that, or even brunch: It's back to work for the both of 'em. McPherson's headed to his international development job, and Buehler, econ textbook in tow, will head to her public health firm.

Kerri Dennis, 20, and her boyfriend Blake Denham, 24, sit at a table inside the Greyhound bus station. A mess of carry-out food between them, Blake rests his head on the table, and tries to fall asleep. It was just after 1 p.m. and the station is dead. In three-and-a-half hours, the couple would be stepping on a bus headed back to their hometown of Anniston, Alabama.

Two days ago, the pair arrived in D.C. to work a similar door-to-door magazine sales job that had lured William Grimes to join his wife here this morning. Grimes had beamed with optimism about the supposedly lucrative work and free travel. Dennis and Denham didn't get past their first day of training—a full 12 hours following around a veteran sales team—before realizing that the majority of their travel would be on foot in faraway counties.

"He didn't like it," Dennis says of her boyfriend. "He just wanted to go home. I follow him wherever he goes."

The two had little time for sightseeing. Instead, they stuck to their Comfort Inn suite in Calvert County. When they got hungry, they ventured across the street  to a Wendy's or down the hill to the KFC. They watched "Family Guy" that first night, and later, tons of movies. Dennis is sure they watched 50 First Dates.

"When we were coming up here on the bus, we saw the Pentagon which was nice. We went on the boardwalk—I'm going to say it was Chesapeake Bay."

But Ocean City sounds familiar, too.

Like her boyfriend, Dennis says that she is homesick, but  "mostly for my grandmother." "She's a very strong woman. She's 79 years old and does everything for herself. She's the biggest inspiration in my life."

Dennis has been dating Denham for nine months. This was their first time sharing a bedroom, living together on their own. "He snores," she says.

*photos by Darrow Montgomery.

If you chose to wed this morning at the H. Carl Moutrie I District of Columbia Courthouse, you would have entered on Indiana Avenue NW, past the seemingly interminable entrance renovation. You would have risen four floors through the atrium on escalators, passing the packed courtroom where a judge would be sentencing accused child murderer Banita Jacks. You would step off the escalator and wend through hallways, past the domestic violence branch, past a family court proceeding. And you would walk into the marriage bureau office, through a perfectly normal waiting room, under a flowered arch, and into the wedding chamber. There, underneath the seal of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and another flowered arch, you would be wed by the lovely Toni F. Gore, branch chief of the family court division.

"Please approach the arch!" she'll tell you when the time comes.

Gore has been doing weddings here for three years. She estimates she's done at least 300 of them. And she doesn't do matrimony every day—just Wednesdays; her deputies handle the other days. You have to call ahead to schedule a half-hour slot, and today, she'll be doing four.

If you ask about her job, she'll tell you: "I do two happy things: marriages and adoptions." But Gore spends the rest of her work week doing other stuff—making sure courtrooms are staffed, reviewing court records, and other managerial tasks. And one other thing: "I don't tell them I do divorces. They don't need to hear that."

She doesn't have to do weddings—when she was promoted to branch chief, she insisted on still doing a few a week. Gore is very good at making a courthouse wedding—what many couples expect to be a prosaic thing—into something worth remembering. It starts with the room, which is clean, quiet, and well-appointed. And it has to be reserved; there's no walk-ins. "It's not a cattle call," Gore says. "It's their special day."

Her favorite wedding, she'll tell you, happened this Valentine's Day—the first time the marriage bureau had been open on a Saturday. She married a couple that had been living together for more than 20 years. They had several children, some of them teenagers.

"At the end of the ceremony, the [teenage] son said, 'Mom, now we've got the same name.' And they hugged. Her son was so happy. They kept hugging."

Turns out YMCAs were tagged as a cruiser's paradise long before the costumed boy band lampooned the health clubs' rep in the 1978 hit single.

The dirty secret was out at least as early as October 1964, when Walter Jenkins, a 46-year-old married advisor to and longtime buddy of President Lyndon Johnson, got caught in a sting operation blowing an older dude in a stall in the men's room of a Y just a couple minutes walk from the White House. (The actual club where Jenkins did his business has been rebuilt since he got stung.)

News of the sex bust didn't break for several days — turns out Jenkins on the day of his bust went straight back to work at the White House after his release from the police station, and worked past midnight as usual.

But, when the story broke, just weeks before election day, it broke big. One biographer said Jenkins became overnight "the most famous homosexual in America."

He resigned from the administration immediately.

Abe Fortas, a pal of Jenkins who talked him out of suicide after the arrest, reportedly told FBI investigators that, "It was common knowledge among Washington attorneys that the YMCA was the home of homos."

There was no political second act around here for Jenkins, who died in Austin, Texas, in 1985.

Some history-revising conspiracy buffs have said that Jenkins was actually busted at the Hay-Adams, and that FBI head honcho J. Edgar Hoover changed the official scene of the tryst to the YMCA to protect the hotel.

If so, I say: Good for Hoover. There's no way a tune called "Hay-Adams" would have played as well in the discos.

In the fall of 1993, the former First Lady of Football was the talk of the town, even moreso than her sugar-daddy husband's Washington Redskins.

After a night of wine drinking at Cafe Milano, while 80-something hubby Jack Kent Cooke was home alone, the oft-married Marlene got in a very public squabble with a boytoy. The streetfight ended when she jumped in the Jaguar paid for by burgundy and gold dollars and tried to drive away.

The Bolivian cougar's boytoy, later identified as 26-year-old Patrick Werner, was heard yelling that the pricey auto was his as he jumped on the Jag and spread himself wide on its hood. Marlene didn't take her pedal off the metal, but only made it a few blocks before being stopped by the cops on M Street.

As we want our divas to, Marlene went apeshit at the police for having the nerve to pull her over just because a man was sprawled on her car. MPD arrested them both. The Washington Post reported that she threw her "gold pumps" at an officer's head when he tried to put her through sobriety tests.

At trial for DUI, testimony showed that cops were so pissed at Marlene, who was a convicted cocaine importer before she'd married Cooke, that they wouldn't even let her take a sobriety test. So a judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence to convict her.

We all soon learned that this Marlene, unlike Dietrich, never wanted to be alone. Reports soon surfaced that she'd been housing Werner in an Alexandria lovenest for months before the Cafe Milano blowup. When Jack Kent Cooke died in 1997, his lawyers tried using her fidelity-free lifestyle as a way to get the wayward fourth wife cut out of his estate.

Like hell that was going to happen: Marlene ended up with at least $20 million, or more than John Kent Cooke, the surviving son.

In Erik P. Christian's courtroom today, the boilerplate plot is reversed for two men. Reginald and Brian both want to make sure that their ex-girlfriends stay 100 feet away from them at all times. The women, however, are no-shows for the courtroom drama. That's another thing they don't tell you on Law & Order: The hardest battle is getting the defendant to show up.

Reginald filed a civil protection order against the mother of his child after she tried to interfere with his new relationship, he says. "Two weeks ago, she showed up at my work, showed up with some girls and tried to attack my girlfriend," Reginald tells the court. Today, however, Reginald's perennial harasser is conspicuously absent from his life. The court informs Reginald that Prince George's County police failed to locate her to serve the court papers. Reginald will have to come back in two weeks. If he wants to force her to stay away from him, he'll have to find her first.

Brian, too, wants the mother of his child to stay away from him. He filed a protection order against her on July 14, and was hoping to secure his year-long protection in court today. The police tried to serve the woman the protection order three times. July 17: No answer. July 22: No answer. July 23: No answer. Now, it's July 29, and she's a no-show as well. Brian will also have to wait another two weeks while police try to get her to answer the door.

Meanwhile, shared interests may eventually bring the two together. "The last time I saw her was a week and a half ago, in the Upper Marlboro Court System," says Brian. "I was going in to pick up court papers. She was going in to pick up court papers. We just happened to both be there."

Two weeks ago, William Grimes called his wife, Erin. He was in Birmingham, Alabama with their two young children. Erin had moved to D.C., lured by the prospect of steady work in door-to-door magazine sales that would provide a decent hourly wage, free hotel and travel. "I was calling her and she was saying that she loved me, that she missed me," Grimes,27, recalls. She promised that he could get a job with the same company.

At 11 a.m., Grimes arrived in the District via a 16-hour Greyhound bus ride. He sat on his luggage—a small carry-on and a camo-patterned backpack—outside the 1st Street NE station. His new sales boss would be picking him up in an hour and a half. Grimes says his wife doesn't know he's here. This morning, he sent a dozen roses to her hotel room anonymously. 

"I'm going to wrap my arms around her and give her a big kiss," Grimes says of his imminent reunion.  

Grimes and his 21-year-old wife have been married for seven and a half years. "She's been my heart all my life," he says. But for much of their marriage, they had to get used to living far apart. Grimes did a more than five year stint in the National Guard and the Army as a weapons specialist. He did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this job, he had to leave their two kids with his parents. "I know that sounds kind of bad," he says. "But money goes everywhere. I had to go with the money. My dad understood."

In three weeks, the sales company will send them to San Francisco. He's already more than satisfied with his first minutes in D.C. even if those minutes were spent outside the Greyhound. He declares that D.C. is "sexy." Tonight, he hopes to take his wife out for a few beers, maybe a meal. And then who knows. He lists the prospects for sex as "very good. Very, very good."

*Text by Jason Cherkis

Carolyn Zolbe

Zolbe, 74, is out in front of Planned Parenthood on 16th Street NW. Her usual schedule is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 2:30 p.m.-4 p.m. Today she's here to back up Dick Retta.

She holds a sign that says "SMILE YOUR MOM CHOSE LIFE" on one side and "ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART" on the other. Another sign has a photo of a group of women who regret their abortions. "We all regret things we've done," says Zolbe. Sticking out of her purse is a laminated card with the music and words to "Salve Regina."

Zolbe, a former Arlington County Public Schools teacher, started coming to the Planned Parenthood in D.C. in 2007, after that year's 40 Days for Life campaign. She met Retta, who was a crozier in a procession from St. Matthews down to the Planned Parenthood building. She was reading the pope's Jesus of Nazareth then and came down every day after her reading time.

"I don't say I protest," she says. "I say I pray at Planned Parenthood."

She asks my mother's name. It's Janet. "I believe in truth and joy," Zolbe tells me. "I see joy on your face." Well, we were talking about my mom.

Perhaps the best hockey team this town ever saw blew up because of what went down in this Georgetown alley.

The 1989-1990 Washington Capitals roster was a great mix of past, current and future stars. The squad made it all the way to the conference finals, before losing to Boston. That was by far the best season in the history of the franchise to that point.

And to celebrate, the organization threw a party for the team right after the semifinals loss at Champions, an, um,  seminal sports bar tucked away from the neighborhood's big intersection, Wisconsin and M Sts. By all accounts, it was a wild bash. Hours after it ended, a teenager filed a report with DC police accusing four Caps — team leaders and fan favorites Scott Stevens, Geoff Courtnall, Dino Cicarrelli and Neil Sheehy — of raping and sodomizing her in a limousine parked by the alley outside the bar.

DC cops told the media that it looked like a crime had indeed occurred. And when word got out that the accuser was only 17 years old, the story became a bombshell. Women's rights groups held rallies outside Champions after it was publicized that the limo was rented for the accused by the bar.

The charges never went anywhere. None of the accused was ever indicted. The accused was never publicly identified. A couple years ago I spoke with the limo driver, who was in the car with the players and the girl, and asked what he remembered about that night and the incident.

“One thing I can tell you for certain: There were no screams for no help,” the driver told me. “She knew exactly what she was doing. She knew she was going to roll those dummies under a damn bus when she got through with them.”

But the accusations alone had a hard and fast impact on the sports franchise and even the bar, which at the time was the city's hottest nightspot in its hottest neighborhood. (ESPN the Magazine put Champions, recognized as the world's first sports bar, on a 2004 list of the greatest innovations in sports history).

The Caps unloaded all the accused as quickly as possible. Champions owner and man-about-town Mike O'Harro soon got out of the sports bar business.

O'Harro once told me that after the incident, "I just said, ‘Maybe it’s time for me to move on.’"

Dick Retta

Retta says abortion is a billion-dollar industry, which is why there's no political appetite to regulate the clinics. "These could be filthy, dirty, we have no idea," he says. Some clinics are "horrible, dirty, roach-infested places."

Retta, who lives in Rockville, has been what pro-life advocates call a sidewalk counselor for 10 years (I found this video featuring him on a Canadian pro-life site). He became an activist when he "began to realize what abortion is."

"You get inspired little by little," he says. "I'm not picketing or protesting." I'm offering women alternatives."

Even after the woman was out of the picture, and Brown began patching things up with his own girlfriend, Brown and Young kept on fighting. Both men have been in and out of Erik P. Christian's courtroom for the past year on various assault charges and protection orders in relation to the mess. Once, Young rode past Brown's house and threatened him with a gun. It ended up being a fake—a cap gun Young borrowed from his son—but Brown didn't know that at the time. Today, Young is in court for another schoolyard-appropriate threat: taunting Brown about prison rape.

A couple of months ago, the two men had a chance meeting in Anacostia Park. Brown was practicing some football drills with a teammate when Young drove up to pick up some items from his mother-in-law. "He pulled up in the parking lot behind my red Mustang," Brown tells the court. "I continued to do my drills. He got back in his truck. He looked like he was wanting to fight. He was bouncing around and stretching. . . . I didn't know what he was going to do. We had had an incident with a gun before, and I didn't know if he was going to start shooting, or what."

Then he rolled the windows down." says Brown. "He said, 'Don't drop the soap!'" Brown recalls. "Don't drop the soap!"

Brown "dropping the soap"—in prison slang, the precursor to being sexually assaulted in the shower—would mean a bit of personal revenge for Young. Brown had recently been found guilty of assaulting Young, and he was awaiting sentencing. "He thought I was going to jail, so I guess he was taunting me about that," says Brown. "Then he drove off real slow."

The prison rape taunt backfired. Though Brown had most recently been convicted, both men had been ordered to stay away from each other—no contact, no fights, and no taunting. By ridiculing Brown about prison life, Young was risking more jail time, too.

In his defense, Young's attorney contended that his client never uttered the "drop the soap" comments in Anacostia Park. Brown, on the other hand, had been practicing more than football that day:  "He made cutting motions to his neck," Young's attorney said, an action which Young "completely ignored."

When it came time for Young to testify about the park meet-up, he broke in to tears. "I acknowledge my mistake that day, on the day of the incident," says Young. "The only reason I was down there was to pick up some items for my mother-in-law's daughter, who was sick," he said. "I do to want to have any contact with Mr. Melvin Brown. I just want to get a move on and get on with my life."

An officer has moved to stand behind Young. Judge Christian hands down his sentence: 180 days in prison, suspended, Young must serve 180 days in prison with one year with two years supervised probation. And he must stay away from Melvin Brown.

Young's lawyer thanks the judge, turns, and quickly walks out of the courtroom. Young surrenders his hat and papers. The officer applies latex gloves to his hands and leads Young into a back room.

There’s been some of that going on at the National Zoo and its Virginia research facility, of course; the stork didn't bring that baby gorilla or those clouded leopard cubs or the red panda or that endangered foal, if you know what I mean.

But let's face it: Not everyone on four legs is getting some. Which, naturally, leads to sexual frustration. Like the kind often exhibited by dogs.

Care of the site ohmidog! comes word – and image – of the first sex toy for (male) canines: the DoggieLoverDoll.

Made out of soft rubber, it comes in the shape of a girl dog, with all the right parts, including “a silicone vagina and an easy to clean reservoir.” A press release announcing its sale by the aptly named PetSmiling, with headquarters in Miami and Sao Paolo, Brazil, explains further:

You may know or have probably heard about these dolls for men that are very popular in Sex Shops around the world. There are inflatable ones, full-body, silicone, as well as other models. So now the first doll for dogs has been launched in Brazil. That’s right, a doll for dogs to practice safe sex. The majority of non-neutered dogs spend a good chunk of time looking for something to hump. They try pillows, furry creatures, people’s legs and even other animals.

And more:

When a dog tries to hump legs, stuffed animals and other objects, he cannot reach an ejaculation. With the DoggieLoverDoll he can. Human beings have their hands to masturbate themselves, now the domestic animals, which have practically no contact with females in heat, can alleviate themselves with a toy designed specifically for them. Dogs have a great sexual appetite and this novelty, surely will better their lives.

The doll comes in three sizes – small, medium and large – because a chihuahua and a Great Dane couldn’t possibly be expected to use one with the same dimensions. During what the company calls the toy’s “testing period,” the pets "showed a better quality of life based on less anxiety, less barking and less territorial demarcation."

Well, yeah: Isn't that what sex does, even in humans?

The toy's site, doggieloverdoll.com, is still being built, but check back if you're in the market. PetSmiling says it has already received orders from the United States, Germany, and Japan.

In 2001, we visited Lorton to chronicle the last days of the prison. The inmates had all been transferred out. But what was left was enough to tell a few stories.

A typical cell contained a metal toilet, a metal mirror, empty milk cartons, and a few hand-drawn calendars. But one cell in particular had been highly personalized with the help of a pencil.

Earlier this summer, FOX deciphered the secret sexting codes teens use to fuck each other on their cell phones. But teens aren't the only ones who need to hide their sexual exploits with absurdly elaborate acronyms. Sex workers and their clients, too, are trained to use the whoooole alphabet.

If you plan to patronize sex workers—and obnoxiously detail your exploits on the Internet—you better be versed in these 31 common trade acronyms. While these sex codes are meant to help johns avoid law enforcement, they have the added benefit of making any guy who uses them sound super douchey.

Do you know the correct racial slur for your masseuse/prostitute? The right acronym to obscure your Holocaust survivor fetish? Can you describe a shitty blowjob in just four easy letters? Test yourself in our sex code quiz, below. Answers after the jump.

SEX CODE WORD:

1. AAMP
2. Aircon BBBJ + Hacks
3. Asian Cowgirl
4. Babyback
5. Baja Sur
6. Barracuda
7. BBBJ
8. BBBJTC
9. BBBJTCWS
10. Beret
11. Blue Steel
12. CCL
13. Civilian
14. CMD
15. Date
16. DFF
17. Ed Zachary disease
18. FOV
19. GFE
20. GF3
21. Hardwood Floors
22. HHHJ
23. Interpreter
24. LBFM
25. Man in a boat
26. NQNS
27. PRC
28. Russian
29. Sybian
30. TCSS
31. XOXO

—

SEX, DECODED: Editor's note: I did not make these up. I swear. Not even "Concentration Camp Look." If these decoded answers still do not make sense to you, well, maybe you just weren't cut out for the world of online john commentary. Consider yourself lucky.

1. "Asian-American Massage Parlor. This is the politically correct acronym."

2. "Scenario: When the maseuse ask, 'want aircon?' if yes, she pop one hacks sweet into her mouth and start blowing."

3. "Girl on top, squatting."

4. "Petite, young, attractive Asian."

5. "Genitals. From the spanish 'the low south'".

6. "A professional prostitute who's only purpose is to separate you from your money as quickly as possible, preferably without giving you anything in return."

7. "Bare Back Blow Job (oral sex without condom)"

8. "Bare Back Blow Job to Completion (oral sex to orgasm)"

9. "Bare Back Blow Job to Completion with Swallowing"

10. "A condom."

11. "Viagra"

12. "Concentration Camp Look."

13. "A woman who makes herself available for sexual encounters but not for financial gain. May be less discreet than a provider and more interested in a relationship."

14. "Carpet Matches Drapes (typically a natural blonde)"

15. "A session with a prostitute"

16. "Dead Fish Fuck"

17. "A woman with an unattractive face."

18. "Finger Outside Vagina"

19. "Girl Friend Experience"

20. "Girl Friend Experience w/all three holes"

21.  "Clean shaven pussy."

22. "Half Hearted Hand Job."

23. "Condom (e.g. She spoke French without the aid of an interpreter = BBBJ)"

24. "Little Brown Fucking Machine"

25. "Clitoris"

26. "Non-quitter, non-spitter"

27. "Women from the People's Republic of China"

28. "Penis between breasts""

29. "A mechanical sex device that is in the shape of half-barrel with a dildo attachment mounted in the middle."

30. "Talk Cock Sing Song"

31. "Kisses & Hugs"

Photo by Todd Huffman

Diane never fucks for money. She only sucks dick. If she's going to suck dick, she's going to insist that her customer's dick wears a condom. This may severely limit her earning potential, but it keeps her relatively safe. Condoms can tear inside you. At least if she's sucking dick, she can spot a broke condom right away.

Diane adjusts her hot pink shorts, pulling them down for a moment to reveal all of her fancy gray panties. She then poses against her white Mercedes SUV like she's a calender model. By far, Diane has more going for her than most of the other girls. She doesn't have a gut. The tattoo on her arm has almost faded away. Her eyes are bright. Her lipstick is perfect.

Diane has been in the trade since she was a teenager. She knows how to come to her job prepared. Unlike the other girls, she isn't constantly haggling for a cigarette. She brings her own and keeps them locked in her Mercedes. When she wants a smoke, she unlocks her SUV and takes one from the front seat.

During her downtime, Diane says she'll talk on her phone or watch a DVD in her Mercedes. She says she already watched Hancock and the new Transformers movie "which was some bullshit."

"It was too fucking long," Diane says. "It didn't start getting good until the end. And 395 started getting backed up." She had to split too much of her time between the traffic and the Transformer battles.

Diane doesn't need to be here. She says she's been married for nine years. He also works nights. "He don't know what I do," she says. "My house phone transfers to my cellphone. I know every time he calls."

Diane adds that she has a day job as a nurse at an old-age home. She wanted to start her own bakery and got as far as filling out paperwork on North Capitol Street. She admits she has trouble following through on things. "I'm a good baker," she says.

Before Diane wanted to be a baker, she wanted to be an actress.

Diane has been a sex worker for about 10 years. Before the luxury condos, bright grocery store and trendy coffee shop moved in, the area used to be a real hang-out spot. 600 K Street wasn't just a stroll. The block had a party atmosphere when she started coming around. Not every girl was a sex worker. But soon, she couldn't help but notice the bills changing hands.

When Diane first started working, she used her earnings for clothes and accessories—what she calls "fashion." Then she started using PCP. The money could more than cover her habit. She says the night of a Howard homecoming was her best—she made $2,500. But some nights are just a lot of standing around leaning suggestively against a Mercedes SUV.

Some nights have ended in arrest. Diane says she has been clean since March 12. She had gotten a prostitution charge and had to submit to drug testing. That was enough. She realized she could go without the drug. She could even watch her husband smoke up right in front of her in their living room. It doesn't bother her.

Diane says she now uses her blowjob money to pay bills. Her only real worry is HIV/AIDS. Even that might have an upside. "I could deal with it," she explains. "That might be the breakthrough in my life. Like God could have a big blessing for you. You got to go through [something] to see the light."

Is she all woman? He wants to know.

Diane assures him. Blondie is all woman.

He tells me his name is Bentley. He says he is 25 and has spent his entire previous day getting high in his home off Benning Road. He looks too athletic to be a drug addict. But as he talks about his high, stroking his goatee, he actually gets wistful about his last 24 hours.

Bentley had dropped hints that he would really like to smoke some more PCP. But now, he's crushing hard on Blondie. He takes a seat on a concrete slab and watches her walk across K Street in his direction.

Blondie gets as far as Diane and her SUV.

"You got some money for me?" Blondie asks Bentley.

"How much," he asks.

"$50."

"I'll give you $40," he says.

This gets no response from Blondie.

"I'll give you $25," Bentley says.

"For what?" Blondie asks.

"I'll give you $25 and I'll put an E pill in your butt," Bentley says. His final offer.

This gets no response.

"You don't want a little E pill in your butt?" Bentley asks. He then turns to me to explain: "White girls like E pills in their butts." He says he heard this from an actual white girl. "Black girls don't know about it."

Tonight, there's a very good chance they will still not know about it.

Diane,25, is hovering in the background, laughing too loud under the lamp light, talking smack to the other women. She is good at smack talk. This gets the other women laughing too loud. The street is empty. There are no customers. Just Onya and Diane and their peanut gallery. "I invented prostitution," Diane boasts, adding that she's been tricking since birth. "I told the doctor don't bill my mother, I'll eat the meat!"

A slack, shrimpy looking dude leans against a pair of parking meters. He says he wishes he had a camera. He's too shy or too broke to actually pay for a trick. But he seems happy to simply be in Diane's presence.

To make sure everyone knew her true celebrity, Diane offers a final, definitive taunt. "Everybody in pretrial knows me," Diane says.

Diane had just pulled up in her white Mercedes SUV. It's 12:30 a.m. Within two minutes, a customer in a silver sedan is negotiating with her. It will be $50 for a blowjob. The negotiations almost take as long as the actual transaction. The two peel away east on K and then up 7th until they disappear.

Within 20 minutes, Diane is dropped off at her Mercedes. She gets out of the sedan, adjusting her hot pink short shorts and black top. She is almost sedate in her movements. Unlike the other girl on the block who approaches cars like she's been called to the principal's office, Diane appears, at least, to be very sure of herself. She takes out a smoke from the Mercedes and lights it.

"I don't kiss and tell," Diane says of her recent work. "That wasn't 20 minutes. It took 10 minutes just to get to my spot."