Three Johns Hopkins University employees of ‘Sugar,’ a sex-toy/paraphernalia shop on 36th St. in Hampden, stripped down to bras and leotards at the annual HonFest last weekend.
SEX-TOY SHOP ‘SUGAR’ ON W. 36th ST.
UPDATE: Photographer Bill Hughes chronicled the HonFest. See his montage below (click on Read more » at end of story).
Three Johns Hopkins University students stripped down to bras and leotards at the annual Hampden HonFest this past weekend to promote their employer’s business, a sex-toy shop called “Sugar” which is owned and operated by lesbians and transsexuals.
The coeds’ actions — whose booth was decorated with a banner proclaiming Sugar’s motto: “Stirring up raw passion” — shook up the “family-friendly” festival, a sarcastic tongue-in-cheek paean to the beehive hairdos and gaudy getups of Baltimore’s blue-collar women of the 1950s.
As proclaimed on its webpage, Sugar is a “lesbian owned, women and trans operated, for profit, mission driven sex toy store” on The Avenue in Hampden.
The three Johns Hopkins students who work there were ordered by festival organizer Denise Whiting, owner of the popular Cafe Hon restaurant and boutique store HONtown, to put their clothes back on.
“We have a more conservative definition of ‘street legal,’” Whiting told the Hopkins students, whose outfits had nothing to do with the 1950s costumes seen in abundance at the festival.
Jacq Jones, a self-described “sex educator” who is — according to her Twitter feed — “the owner/princess/proprietress of Sugar, a fabulous sex toy store in Baltimore,” told Voice of Baltimore she never instructed the women to take off any clothes, nor did she know they had done so until after the fact, although she acknowledged asking them when they attended the festival to promote the store.
Which they did, attracting lots of attention, until they were shut down by Cafe Hon’s Whiting, who promotes herself and her businesses (restaurant and store) as the epitome of Hon-dom, even trademarking the word “Hon” two years ago, to the consternation and condemnation of virtually all of Baltimore.
Whiting was boycotted for more than a year and nearly went bankrupt until saved by TV’s “Kitchen Nightmares” host, Chef Gordon Ramsay, who resurrected her business in February 2012.
See VoB’s coverage of the Cafe Hon/
Denise Whiting controversy (click here)
— VoB Staff report
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
June 10th, 2013 - 11:48 AM
This story reads like a Daily Mail/NYPost outtake, minus “relevant” photos – maybe the worst of both worlds. Ask yourself, if instead of JHU students the women had been community college students or bartenders or moms, would this even be a story? And lesbians own a business, nooo! Is this a stop-the-presses observation?
But poor Denise! That part’s funny, and does fit the long-running story line in which she can’t win for losing.
June 10th, 2013 - 12:50 PM
Thanks for your Comment, eo, we’re sorry we weren’t able to get photos of the women in their bras and leotards. [Cancel that! we’ve updated the story with a montage by Photographer Bill Hughes. Check it out!]
But you are correct: The fact that they’re enrolled at Hopkins and not B-Trip or Essex — or even Towson U. or Catonsville — is what makes this a story. It’s for sure that Milton Eisenhower is turning somersaults in his grave. We’d also love to hear what Michael Bloomberg has to say.
Also, the fact that “Sugar” is heralded on their website as a “lesbian owned, women and trans operated, for profit, mission driven sex toy store” is significant. Check it out: http://sugartheshop.com/home.html …and scroll down to “Mission” at the bottom of the page.
We’re not trying to make judgments here, just reporting facts. It requires a special effort though, to be objective when reporting on Denise.
June 10th, 2013 - 1:51 PM
*Why* is it significant that the shop is “lesbian owned”? You say it is significant in your comment, but don’t explain why. What difference would it make if the shop were owned by, say, hetero women or gay men?
Similarly, why is it significant that the students attend JHU? Are you shocked that there are lesbians at JHU, or shocked that anybody at JHU uses sex toys, or shocked that lesbians can be entepreneurial? I’m trying to understand your astonishment and why you’d claim “It’s for sure that Milton Eisenhower is turning somersaults in his grave”? Was Milton homophobic?
June 10th, 2013 - 9:48 PM
Don’t listen to the critics. Good story. 🙂
June 11th, 2013 - 7:48 AM
VoB appreciates your Comment, quasimodem, but don’t you think it’s significant when a businessperson goes out of her way to spell out the sexual orientation of her store and its employees? We do. Similarly, if heterosexual businesswomen or men so specified in their advertising and promotion, we would report that also.
As for Milton Eisenhower, whether he was or was not homophobic is not the issue here and totally misses the point. Plus he’s been dead for 28 years, so who cares? The point is that he would have surely been dismayed, if not shocked, to see students at one of the finest educational institutions in the world — a university whose reputation he helped rise to astronomical heights — behaving like bimbos.
At Voice of Baltimore we are neither shocked nor astonished by the behavior of these women, which, sadly, has become a fact of new millennium life. Johns Hopkins however is still a cut above — and we believe the behavior of its students should be also. Unfortunately neither theirs nor some of its doctors meets that standard — the late gynecologist Nikita Levy, for example, who earlier this year was revealed to have surreptitiously photographed his female patients, comes immediately to mind.
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@ gms: Thanks, we appreciate the vote of confidence, and positive commentary as well.
February 20th, 2014 - 12:31 AM
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