Some time in the early 2000s, when Audrey* was still a teenager living in his parents’ house, a commercial interrupted his covert, late-night viewing of the Sunday Night Sex Show, sex therapist Sue Johanson’s hour of televised call-in advice which ran from 1996 to 2005. The Canadian TV program, which at the time was Audrey’s main outlet for sexual information, surprised him by advertising a resource close to where he lived in Pittsburgh’s South Hills: “The Outer Skin for the Inner You: I never forgot that [name].”
I first met Audrey when he messaged me on Twitter in February of 2022, soon after a piece I wrote for Pittsburgh City Paper about an adult bookstore in McKeesport, Modern Adult 711, came out. Audrey was looking for information about how to cruise and for someone who would accept his devotion to crossdressing — and his total secrecy about it.
More recently, I reached out to Audrey because I was looking to find out why The Outer Skin, which once described itself as “The Largest Adult Store in the East,” had closed, suddenly and without warning. It seemed like the kind of place he may have had some experience with. It turned out I was correct.
On drives down 51 toward McKeesport, I had noticed the neon sign switched off, the mannequins in the display windows abandoned in their black satin gloves beneath signs advertising “Men’s Wear” and “Costumes & Accessories,” a hand-written notice taped to the locked side door warning “Do Not Change These Locks!” and directing anyone with questions to call Brandi Pickering or her attorney Esther Evans: “This Property Is Owned By An Estate Currently Pending In Orphan’s Court.” As the name suggests, Orphan’s Court handles adoptions, as well as other intimate relational matters in which the law intervenes: estates and wills, trusts and guardianships, marriage licenses, parental rights, etc. I tried both numbers listed on the sign but got no response, so I began to investigate what had happened to The Outer Skin, and what the store’s closure might mean for those who frequented it.
Audrey told me it was seven years after that commercial on late-night cable before he got up the courage as a sophomore in college to visit the now-closed Ultra Flash boutique, which primarily sold clothing for dancers working at area strip clubs. Audrey purchased a pair of thigh-highs and a garter belt at the boutique but never returned. “The shop was next to The Xchange [a comics and gaming store], and I knew too many people who might be there, I didn’t want to be recognized,” he said. Some time after that, in his early 20s, Audrey finally made his way to The Outer Skin for the Inner You, whose merchandise was similar to what was available at Ultra Flash, but there, Audrey was part of the target clientele, not an aberration.
The Outer Skin, which former contractor Richard Pickering opened in Munhall in 1999, occupied a sprawling half-block along Eighth Avenue just east of the Homestead Grays Bridge and was decorated with a large neon sign depicting the male and female symbols fused into one. According to a story in the Post-Gazette in the year 2000, Pickering was inspired to open the store after a visit to Las Vegas, during which he noticed many “small, specialty sex shops” and wondered what it might be like to consolidate their offerings.
When the store opened, there was nothing like it in Pittsburgh.
The shop, which the Post-Gazette described as a “department store of fantasy and sexuality,” sold a wide array of sex toys, fetish outfits — construction workers, nurses, angels and devils — and, especially, clothing for crossdressers and sissies like Audrey, who requested to be identified as a “sissy slut” for this article.
A “completely stocked Lifestyle Fantasy Room” at the back was available to rent for parties of up to 110, according to that PG Style File column. In the 2000s, that room became a dungeon, Le Domaine Playground. Tammy Resnick, who holds the title of Ms. Pittsburgh Leather 1997 and was the only other source who would provide firsthand information about The Outer Skin for Pittsburgh City Paper, says most people using the dungeon were part of a straight swinger scene, and there wasn’t much crossover in clientele with Pittsburgh’s queer and leather communities.
In 2005, Pickering’s then-fiance Lois Murrman opened the short-lived Lolita’s Boutique on Clairton Boulevard; she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that she intended for the store to be “a softer version” of Pickering’s establishment in Munhall, where later that year she was identified as the store manager in another article. (Murrman also told the paper that she “was named Lolita as a child and like[d] its exotic sound.”)
Despite titillating coverage of the stores, major opposition to The Outer Skin appears to have been limited to one indignant letter to the editor of the Post-Gazette following the 2000 profile; a resident of Baldwin Borough objected to the store being featured in the paper’s “Style File” when, she contended, such content might belong “in a ‘skin rag’ but certainly not in the society page of the PG ... This type of article is hardly fodder for the breakfast table nor acceptable to be seen by children who are innocently looking for a current event to use in a homework assignment.” Otherwise, it appears from the outside, store operations chugged along just fine.
Richard Pickering and Lois Murrman had married, and she had changed her last name to match his, by the time he died in Feb. 2022. The obituary acknowledged the store earnestly but indirectly, stating that “[a]gainst all odds, Richard became a successful self-made businessman.” Pickering’s unlikely business, The Outer Skin for the Inner You, closed almost immediately after his death. In addition to his second wife, Lois, Pickering was survived by two children from his own first marriage and two from Lois’s.
In May of 2022, the Pittsburgh Legal Journal noted that Brandi, Pickering’s daughter from his first marriage, and not Lois, was the executor of Pickering’s estate. What the dynamic is or was between these women I can only speculate: when my calls, including to the number listed on the corrugated plastic liquidator sign which later filled the front window to the store, continued to go unanswered, I began to get the sense that the reasons for the shop’s closure were not so much legislative or infrastructural as personal — private as the desires Audrey tried to satisfy by visiting The Outer Skin.
Nonetheless, the silence I found surrounding the shop, as well as Audrey’s requests for repeated assurances that I would protect his identity for this story, and the Baldwin Borough letter-writer’s objections all pointed to a social conspiracy of protection and secrecy among those patronizing The Outer Skin for the Inner You. The store provided a space where secrets could briefly be shared — swingers swing, but they always return to stasis.
While I could speculate about what drove Richard Pickering to devote the last 23 years of his life to running a niche fetish store — whose name advertised gender transgression and truth-telling that might seem at odds with the way a person presents themself to the world day-to-day — that would be invasive, unverifiable, and unkind. Instead, what I’ve now come to realize is that what is private between people, including estate disputes which take them to court in the wake of a death, should be allowed to stay that way. Who among us does not have pieces of ourselves which we share with a select few, or none at all? How strong is the charge, the fear or thrill, when we choose to reveal those pieces? How great the violation when others reveal them for us?
When I asked Audrey, who hadn’t patronized the store for many years before Pickering’s death, what, if anything, its closure meant to him, he told me, in no uncertain terms, “There’s nowhere else I feel comfortable going to buy those items, and I can’t order them to my house.” He wasn’t sure whether there was a community of crossdressers or sissies that he might be part of, and the risk of finding out, he told me, was too great.
Little lament has been made over the loss of places which people who don’t necessarily identify as queer or trans go to realize desires which don’t fit into the rest of their lives. Is death a closet for Pickering? Is the family a grave? What will happen to people who keep their erotic selves secret when there’s no place to go where they can briefly relieve themselves of that burden?
